From May 16 through June 18, 2006 the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi presents I Like Things, in the space of Palazzo dell’Arengario in Piazza del Duomo in Milan. A new exhibition by Turner Prize recipient Martin Creed, I Like Things brings together an extensive selection of recent works, public projects, and new productions specifically conceived for this exhibition.

Martin Creed’s sculptures, installations and drawings come from the objects, words, and sounds of everyday life. Constantly searching for the basic nature of things, Martin Creed uses the simplest materials to create a world in which obsessions and fantasies radically alter reality and transform it into a catalogue of rigid rules and unexpected exceptions. Martin Creed’s work, in fact, is at the same time spectacular and subtle, playful and severe, and at times almost cruel in its stark dryness.

Absurd laws and sudden mishaps, often amplified by the direct participation of the audience, regulate Martin Creed’s imaginative universe. On the façade of the Palazzo dell’Arengario, a neon sign reading, Everything is Going to Be Alright, one of Martin Creed’s iconic works, celebrates optimism, while making an ironic commentary on today’s consumer-driven society. The work might also remind local visitors of the Italian commercial boom when Piazza Del Duomo was flooded by advertisements and neon lights projecting a mirage of a better future.

Martin Creed’s light minimalism is simple and at the same time extreme: a series of plywood sheets, in the most standard size available on the market, are piled on top of each others as to compose a clumsy and yet somehow perfect geometric figure. In the first room of Palazzo dell’Arengario, transformed into a sort of decadent nightclub, Martin Creed also presents a piano interpreting an awkward mechanical ballet. Animated by awkward, uncontrollable urges, the piano abandons its graceful function becoming a possessed mechanism.

Even the air we breath and the space around us can be altered by the artist who appropriates the world around him with frantic enthusiasm: two wind machines recast the entrance to the exhibition while the sign Small Things works both as a light sculpture and as a poetic statement. Martin Creed’s art, in fact, is based on an obsessive and hallucinated capacity to turn daily objects into mysterious monuments to a new objectivity.

In the main room of the building, the austere Sala delle Colonne, Martin Creed presents the piece with which he was awarded the 2001 Turner Prize from the Tate. The installation The Lights Going On and Off consists of nothing more than the lights switching maniacally on and off in the space every second. The work is at the same time an ascetic gesture of disarming simplicity and an ironic invitation to re-imagine a new destiny.

The human body is also a major source in Martin Creed’s base materials. For his show in Milan, the British artist presents his first performance piece: men and women suddenly start running throughout the exhibition space, with no apparent reason. A metaphor of the capacity to build art out of nothing, or the Sisyphean struggle of life, the work offers an obscure metaphor of today’s looming paranoia and existentialism. The same sense of insecurity resurfaces in the video at the end of the exhibition, which features a girl compulsively vomiting in front of the camera.

The Fondazione Nicola Trussardi continues its nomadic adventure in the city of Milan with I Like Things in Piazza del Duomo, in the Palazzo dell'Arengario, which opens its doors to visitors for the last time before closing for a major architectural restoration. Martin Creed’s exhibition is therefore not only a chance to see the work of one of the most interesting artists working today, but also a great opportunity to learn more about the history of Milan and one of its most significant historical buildings, seen through the eyes of an irreverent and eccentric artist.

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