Games are always plural. A game has to be very disappointing to not want to start a new round and then another. The Brick Game video game console that flooded the market in the 90s promised to contain 9999 games. It was probably much less, but it doesn’t matter, without a doubt Tetris was the one that got me hooked, the one I liked the most. Many years later, I still play for long periods of time on airplane trips where they still offer this idle option. I love the paradox of how it works. To advance without advancing. To move up a level, the brick wall has to remain as low as possible, as other bricks progressively fall. If there are gaps in the wall and its height grows too high, until it passes the upper limit of the screen, the game ends. On the contrary, it is a matter of forming one or more lines, from one side to the other, compact and seamless, so that the bricks disappear, thus leaving more space for the others that, in the meantime, continue to fall, each time at a faster and faster speed. At the formal and chromatic level, it is a question of creating unions of independent fragments. Discontinuous unions awaiting the decisive fragment that will appear to resolve and complete the compact and seamless lines.

I was going to write that this game relaxes me, in reality maybe I just quit thinking for a while focusing on a repetitive, simple, and bland activity. Like smoking, enjoying a Martin Creed play, throwing a ball against a wall that always comes back to you where you more or less expect it, or swinging while whistling surrounded by trees. Do my serotonin levels go up playing Tetris? And watching Martin Creed’s video Thinking / Not Thinking (Work #1090)? I don’t know. Experts have compiled lists of various tips to increase in a non-pharmacological way, the brain’s production of serotonin. Serotonin is also known as the ‘happiness neurotransmitter’. The lists I have consulted do not include the Martin Creed video or Tetris among their tips. Yet, undoubtedly, there is something comforting in Tetris, in the sudden disappearance of blocks of discontinuous unions of independent fragments.

At the same time, it is terrible when this does not happen and useless holes are formed, when the fragments no longer fit and are horribly displaced. Like thinking you know and not knowing at all, believing you know a painting, but not remembering its details. Like Bergotte and that petit pan de mur jaune in Vermeer’s view of Delft that tormented him so much and was probably going to cost him his life… A tiny detail, a brick wall hit by the sunlight, in the background of a Dutch cityscape.

At the same time, the iconography of red bricks, united by white orthogonal lines, refers in my head to a famous photo by Kate Simon from 1976, where Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon pose defiantly in a London alley. This photo will end up on the cover of The Clash’s first album to be released on April 8 of the following year.

If we are emphasising bricks and playful activities, it is because this exhibition takes as its starting point the modular structures and iconography of Richard Woods. He uses them as a support for the works of the other invited artists, proposing an environment similar to a video game, where brick structures descend from the ceiling or emerge from the floor for no apparent reason. These works are presented on walls and structural surfaces or ephemeral scenographies, white or painted red, like the classic British bricks.

The works of the sixteen artists gathered together propose different languages that approach the urban, (video)games and design. In a discontinuous manner, each is an independent fragment. “What defense can a discontinuous wall offer?” wondered the narrator in The Building of the Chinese Wall. Like that story, this project proposes a system of partial construction, unfinished unions, thus offering several possible routes, comings and goings, in search of increasing the serotonin levels of those who visit this group exhibition.

Francesco Giaveri, exhibition curator