The Biennale exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, has turned out to be something of a coup. He has compellingly followed through his basic idea of submerging him and us – via surrealism, spiritualist abstraction, ‘outsider art’, popular culture – into the phantasmagorical unconscious and the primordial of 20th century art (and its digital counterpart of the 21st).
A sense of magic pervades the main exhibition of this year's Venice Biennale. In the Central Pavilion, curator Massimiliano Gioni has chosen to present a number of artists whose working methodology comes through esoteric influences, spirituality, private mysticism and personal fetishism. So the title of Jeremy Deller’s British Pavilion, 'English Magic', was fitting. If Gioni’s dextrous presentation often looks to historical inspiration, Deller’s anthropological take on all things English is rooted firmly in the present.
