ANDREA SWOBODA
Art Theorist / Terrorist

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The great enemy - Marginalisation of art as indicator of an entrapped society

The social media.

At first sight it seems that Art may benefit of the easy chances of divulgation through the social media of web 2.0, that are those commonly called social-networks. But the appearance conceals more detrimental dimensions.
We all know alredy the negative fact, but it is not the main one, that many artists, as anybody else, are self-referentially interested in their own affirmation and in the moment, thinking that it is represented by the followers, by sharings and by the "likes" (which can be anyway insincere or given by those who search for mutual consensus) that are instead tools to control and to take advantage of individual and disjointed opinions for the sake of all-absorbing politics. Those artists do not analyse the context and the evolution of the system in its complexity, they see in the consensus an immediate reward for their efforts and thus think to find opportunities, but in reality they lay on the same level of any other individual in the fight for affirmation, subduing to the conformism of a world that is aligned, entrapped, forced, and at times squalid; that is not the purpose of Art: the contemporary artistic sentiment was born with the need to emancipate from the slavery of profit.

But the fundamental problem, about which most people may not be aware, is that the social media favour in primis the divulgation of an infinity of other things, either from the execrable mainstream and from that world composed of the buffaloing uncritical, ignorant or unaware mass, that in large part lingers on void witticisms, small talks, gossips, outrages, adulations, etcetera, or even worse on the needless repetition of mantras of the "politically correct" righteousness, seasoned with jolly cartoons, forming a frightful mass, a cyclone of things that saturate the public attention and encumber the minds, marginalising that bit of good that is left with a crushing disproportion.
This is the great enemy: the too much of everything that distracts, snatching time from people, while Art is the opposite of everything and quickly; Art is distillation: it requires time to be produced and time to be tasted, so the true artist is often a hermit who voluntarily segregates in order to think and create without the brainwashing of a frenzied world. And also the true art lover is often a digital hermit, who finds the calmness and lucidity, to enter into contact with the thin conscience encoded in the work of art, only keeping outside the cacophony of social media.

The life of people is already obliterated by errands, by the job and responsibilities they are subjected to, so that the most common manifestation of surrender is expressed with the phrase "I have no time", to the point that in the little spare time, often pinched from the sleep also augmenting the exhaustion, people is searching for relax, especially intellectual, ending up in being trapped by the superficiality offered in the social and mass media that soothe all the prig's anguishes. Even worse, many people waste their own life in being social-networks' majordomos, managing the abnormal mass of relations in a condition of addiction and subjugation that is self-feeding right on the too many virtual social relations, at last getting lost into the uncertainty due to the dissonance of pluralism.

Into this bedlam, Art seems nothing more than a speck of dust and often it is relegated to the purpose of mere visual support for the wisecrack or of testimonial for the small talk. In the boundless global polyphony of socials, even the sublime gets lost, and that does not benefit Art, that has lost the aura, the charisma and the conceptual significance that we used to confer it before the advent of social media, when the information was coming only from catalogues and niche paper magazines, on which we used to linger in silence, with calm and rapture. Art in social media sometimes even undergoes (in a permanent way) to the mocking comments of rude couldn't-care-less people, who are more interested in pub quarrels and dirty jokes than culture.
Art does not deserve socials, and socials does not deserve Art. As Bloch says, never argue with a fool as people might not know the difference, and because as Wilde says, the idiot wins for experience after having dragged you to his level; in fact, to discuss with a stupid, the intelligent must go down to his level, the opposite will never happen, not in the time span of a discussion, elevation requires time.

Social media lower the intellectual level of Art to the human lowest grade or most superficial condition, in fact Art is loosing ground and edge because is slowly going to be considered a frivolous phenomenon, a devalued mass entertainment, at the same level of the vignettes about Osho's philosophy or those pictures with tender kittens.
Artists please protect Art from this unfair comparison.
Since the first moment when this site was published, just while the most widespread social network of today was timidly showing up, I avoided the implementation of visitors' comments that was becoming so common in web 2.0, preferring the possible proposal of complete and elaborated speeches; for this reason I always refused social networks, because their only reason to exist is functional to the agon for the masses where the winner is who produces or looks for consensus, while Art is often necessarily troublesome. And let alone the totalitarian and dictatorial drift of profit that rules with its censorship for everything is going the opposite direction. After all, private epistolary relations, via e-mail, are more satisfying, where we can exchange opinions unworried about being disturbed by hordes of oafs, but also the criticisms that raise the debate when constructive, or simply ignored if perfidious, all things that no "like" nor "dislike" will never substitute.

Lastly, you have also to take into consideration the sharing, the digital publication, of a myriad of works of art and of whole portfolios for public consultation, especially into the social networks but also on the internet generally, it makes the need for art to extinguish too easily just browsing the web, which is offering an appalling amount of material that is growing year after year, adding up to centuries of classical art that is by now all visible in maximum detail on the internet. In ancient times, artists could just give a business card, invite people to see some artworks in their studios and possibly offer some catalogues on request, nonetheless the modern epoch gave birth to those myths which names can not be eclipsed by today's artists, despite (or cause of) the exhausting on-line presence. I always thought that the on-line publication of works of art should be administered in dribs and drabs, recommending to the artists I came into contact to publish when possible only the works that have been sold or maybe already featured in exhibitions, not the new or never exhibited ones, and to make their portfolios available privately for the art operators or also on request for the public, even to the sake of protecting them from plagiarism. All in all, the art lover and the public must not extinguish their own thirst for art watching it on-line. Last but not least, as I always underline and recommend suggesting, Art must be seen and "touched" from real: many works of art seen for the first time on the computer (as much as on a catalogue, after all,) or worse on the small screen of a mobile phone, loose efficacy and strength, they can not render the same sensations of the artwork as seen from real, in its materiality and dimensions, meant as contextualised proportions.


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Viva Ai Weiwei - Reference artist of our times

The much famous artist Ai Weiwei has recently been criticised for a supposedly harsh comment against Italians and their relation with China in a difficult time. It’s useless to go on about further on the debate between points of view that can’t meet, you may know that already or you can do a search for yourself.

The scornful way with which he pressed the Italians is nonetheless extremely opportune, at least because they are guilty of sloth and compliance to an oppressive government that has joined, as usual, with what it considered the strongest power of the time, that is in this epoch China. Before it was the Nazis, then the United Nations, now China.

Absolutely I love China’s culture, the Chinese people and their traditions, its great philosophers enlightened thinkers, as much as the Italian ones, but not their contemporary government. China is no more the one of Lao Tzu, it’s a large oligarchic capitalism that’s hidden behind the diaphanous spectres of a just socialism that is dead and cremated.

China is the largest, overbearing and asphyxiating dictatorship of the world, their government succeed in subjugate extremely efficiently two billions of individuals; this is captivating the rulers of other nations, even if they pretend to be fighting China and self-proclaim democratic and free, while they have the same intents.
Now Chinese dictatorship is invading the world, with its A.I. technology, of mass surveillance, Australia already acquired the Chinese technology, the Chinese government is a danger for individual freedom, first of all of the artists, a danger for the free thought, for the freedom of expression.

Do you know what living in China does mean? Do you know what you can see, tell or do on the internet in China? Do you know that the Chinese government is forcing a system of “social credit” for which millions of people have been prevented to travel by train or flight just because they are disliked by the government?
Do you know that many Chinese youngsters not even know about the riots of Tienanmen Square?

Think about it.

The western world is becoming at fast pace always more “Chinese”, or rather the totalitarian power in today’s China has acquired all the worst features of the turbo-capitalism, from the worst oligarchy of techno-bureaucratic oppressors.

It’s good to remember that Ai Weiwei, artist, disobedient, dissident, has been incarcerated for defending his own thought.
Ai Weiwei flew his own country, from his traditions, from what he loves, like many of “lucky” fellow citizens, exiles in search for freedom. But day after day he is stumbling again upon the shadow of Chinese government wherever he goes, dictatorship is spreading like oil on the sea surface.
Italy in few decades has become a highly “Chinesized” country, where oppression become every day more heavy and asphyxiating, Ai Weiwei is doing well treating the sleeping Italians with the same despise with which he whacked Chinese government since ever.
In this case it’s not much important the message, but against who is directed and the reasons at the origin, in this sense the despise is never gratuitous. Italy, already far ahead with the oppression of people, has now chosen China and its formidable dictatorship model.

Do you know that hundreds dissident Chinese artists are incarcerated, and many more are kept under control and in fear of being incarcerated?

Think about it.

In our times, Ai Weiwei, along each one of the many dissident artists, is the model artist, who should be taken as example by the artists of all the world, whatever their ideological inclination is, to defend the most precious common good, which is seriously in danger today: freedom.



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The contemporary performance - Video existences beyond the society of images

Historically, from the conceptual point of view, traditional performance artists like Jochen Gerz or Marina Abramović & Ulay have made us accustomed to the identification of this artistic activity with the overcoming, or indeed the reaching, of human limits.
The need to shock with something uncommon, to extend the limits of thought beyond the incomprehensible and to shake a conformism as much ummovable as desperately normalising, turned the actions gradually more extreme, until this became the final conceptual purpose.

Instead, from the practical point of view, since start the performance, even that of the dematerialised art of Allan Kaprow, needed to be recorded to survive and to persist in history, needed a support, either cine or photo and successively video: videoperformance was born and, thanks to the prospect of deferred screenings, it ended up in having no need for a physically present public any more. Then, with the coming of internet and on-line videos, the videoperformance would finally be enjoyed by an audience way wider than that of a physical location.

Albeit people often connect them one each other, videoperformance and videoart should not be confused: a performance mainly is the enacting of a premeditated play, just like at the theatre, even though sometimes improvised and susceptible of extemporary variations or for the spectators' intervention. The action done by the artist must be the preponderant element in the concerning video recording, not the collateral use of one's own image into a video artwork.

Today the performance in video has become a mass phenomenon: sharing a video on-line is at anyone's reach, so we are witnessing to the proliferation of shootings immortalising challenges, stunts, demonstrations of one's own talent, in the accepted meaning of performance as feat, or striking and valiant deeds.
In this multitude, the borderlines between the motivations of video-posting and of artistic performance are indistinct, to the point that only those performance artists who where ahead and acted before the coming of internet (or in some cases of television), could be considered the only milestones representing a movement exhausted by now, because it has fulfilled its purpose, of a concluded epoch, because assimilated by society; but, you know, artists soon or later change things, thus it is interesting to explore contemporary trends trying to understand where performing art is going to.

Today's video-posting faithfully reflects the identification of art with life preconised by the Fluxus of Allan Kaprow, and seems inspired to the longing for the overcoming of one's own limits faced by the most popular modern performers like Marina Abramović, confirming the massification occurred.

Currently, the traditional performance, the live one, survives just in few cases, ceding the floor to videoperformance, that offers the advantages of new technological means, but also for the suffering global economy, which sets limits and demands an ethical involvement either to the artists and to the public; from this point of view, videoperformance has shifted the objective in the overcoming of limits from the human sphere to the economic one.

The artistic performances aiming to astonish or to scandalise public opinion, by now does not raise much clamour any more, seeming quite mild and naive in front of the myriads of way more shocking videos shared by "anonymous" individuals, like the acrobatic follies of extreme parkour, several times ended up in the death "live" of the athlete, just like snuff-movies. The performances about pain, on the solicitation of human endurance, by now could be considered not up with the times any more: the reality, among overwork, body-modding, self-harm attitudes and BDSM, has overcome the timid fantasies of artists of the past. Although for a reason.

It is important to notice that on-line videos of art performances gain few visualisations respectively to those from "unknown" people searching for their own "fifteen minutes of celebrity", which instead get even millions. This is due to the fact that very often the artists are extremely sensible people, who have undertook a philosophic journey and who utilise the means for a different purpose than the mere self-affirmation, and to transmit a thought or metaphysical concept, to share their own conviction, and not a frivolous "monstrosity", a virtuosity record or one's own status; on the contrary, they are more often actors for the sake of everyone, supported by a Magrittean ability to annul one's own ego, thus resulting deeply disturbing to large part of the public accustomed to mainstream disculture, that promotes the satisfaction of egocentric hedonism and pride.

Today we are witnessing to the development of videoperformances getting back a distance from the sparkling extremism, searching for the minimalism in daily life, although always attentive to surrounding phenomenons, tending to be more respectful for the human being and more meticulous in formulating messages. Nearly in a conceptual folding up, the most actual videoperformances portray frail, sensible and insecure actors, who question themselves. But that nihilism is positive, it is a defence passivity guaranteeing continuity to the message, a tactic of resistance and perseverance worthy of Sun Tzu.

Ascertaining many similarities, we could assert that contemporary videoperformance represents the natural evolution of the thinking of Joseph Beuys, one of the most influential artists in this field.

Today's videoperformance's answer is quite like a mea culpa: the artists return to consider the limits of their own existence, the spiritual or metaphysical intimacy, addressing it to the collective conscience, not much to the physical or visual presence, which becomes just an aesthetic frill, although needed as an attraction. This inclination is aimed to stem a massificated movement that went astray, to correct the wrong interpretation that evidently the public gave to the historic performance, since the masses are still and always in the grip of materialism, thus they did not grasped the profound meaning of such performances wishing to break the mental schemes, not the practical ones, but that invariably have been adapted to the pragmatism of the consumerist era, to the point of becoming a commercial phenomenon.


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Curatorial Art - The role of the art exhibitions curator

I take the chance of the umpteenth censure done by the Exibart site to write this short article, reporting what I entered as a comment to their article entitled "The end of the curator." ¹

That article, visible at http://www.exibart.com/notizia.asp?IDNotizia=51434 (Italian), reports obsolescence cases of the art exhibitions curators' figure, and agreeably wishing for it.

But the curator is indeed another artist, he practices the art of curatorship, the Curatorial Art, which consists, or at least should consist, in communicating concepts or feelings using the artworks of the artists for whom an exhibition is curated. The curator artist express himself, as mush as the artist appropriating other's works, in particular way similarly to the collage or the objet trouvé.
A group exhibition conceived by a curator practically is a "conceptual collage;" thus the curator should be enclosed in the same list of the participating artists. From this perspective, also a solo exhibition, with just one artist and one curator doing his task, indeed should be always considered a double-solo exhibition.
However, since the main task of the curator is organisational, the curator's role is assimilable to the cinema director, for this reason he is listed apart conferring him more importance.
Yet, much often the curator deals with many other aspects of an exhibition: conception, image, logistics, public relations and press office, to the point that demeaning his importance is clearly unjustifiable.

Obviously I agree with the interchangeability of the roles, that is the curator may be surely substituted by an artist, as anybody with a bit of cognisance and intelligence can do the curator, as much as he can do the artist; but in the same way also a curator can be an artist, or as I assert, he is indeed.

But, let us investigate on this trend to abolish the curators making exhibitions organised by the artists themselves: actually that is motivated solely by the economic crisis; if we were living steadier times this and other even more specific figures would flourish, each engaged in dealing with one role in the complex and demanding task of organising an art exhibition.

Thus, if someone demeans the importance of curators, these instead may impose themselves more, getting on the same podium of the artists, because no personal inclination for artistic expression that can be sacrificed in the name of profit do exist: that would be like stating that only the successful artists have the right to exist.

Finally, the abolition of the curator, maybe supplanted by the as democratic as materialistic social network, is another aspect of that process wishing to relegate art and artists into the desolate role of wares before the sole presence of customers, isolating them into a totalitarian binomial artist-market, where one exists only as a function of the raised profit; a democratic and anonymous world of object-people depending on likes.

Note: ¹ It is incomprehensible what was so undesirable in my comment, but this is just one of the many that Exibart refused to publish. The Exibart.com site is known since ever for putting into practice an apparently whimsy censorship that have no justification but the will to support a precise and bossy policy, but so, why they do permit the opportunity to leave comments if then they can not accept conflicting opinions? Just know that in the past (even before their editorial staff participated to a mutiny en masse to then form Artribune.com, which however has inherited in some way their attitude) they have seen the sudden vanishing of the lively community that participated to their free theme forum, for being fed of the unmotivated and continuous censures.


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A world of slaves - Which art toward freedom?

Apart some brave outcasts, and excluding residual tribal societies still uncontaminated by the modernity, human society is founded on slavery. The modern man is subjugated by a dependency to the system that makes him a slave. His metaphorical chain is money, problem and solution to the problem, alfa and omega of his existence, the one only god.

This may sound like the typical argumentation that Jehovah's Witnesses bring to favour their cause, but indeed that is the reality, we all know this, after all. Perhaps some people are unaware, or prefer to forget, but many recognise that is a fact, although we all do not know how to avoid this curse. The reason is simple: to escape from that, first of all we should agree jointly all together, otherwise if a minority of people quit the game, those would end in raising the number of brave outcasts, heroes, saints and martyrs; an arduous choice indeed, that is preferably delegated to the actual superhero or christ, but who can not definitely wipe the basic problem anyway, although they set an example of higher stoicism and wake consciences. For this reason, in a moment ruled by the Profit god, it is possible and necessary to work all together on divulgation, in spreading the though for the building of a free world.

I founded this site also with this vision: to use the reactionary, symbolic and evocative power of art to emancipate from slavery the human being, either the artist-maker or the onlooker-beneficiary, as also the name of the site originated from the word Freedom. Freeing the individual from the schemes that makes him a slave, at any level and of every social class, even who believes to be wealthy, but indeed even more slave of that system monopolising his life and brain, which now can think about nothing but profit.

The topics I propose in this site had always a peculiarity: they are directed from art toward the public, introducing critiques, examinations, interpretations, yet always something going from the makers to the beneficiaries; some kind of an imposition, or maybe euphemistically an advice or suggestion.
This time I want instead to be even more direct, editing an article that straightforwardly speaks to the public, the beneficiaries of Art.

The speculation and exploitation, characteristics needed by the world of profit that makes us slaves, have inevitably generated a bubble that has exploded since some time, leaving the so called economic crisis, that is to say they finally have unveiled the visceral lack of equity typical of this system of exploitation.

So, the world has get to know the real face of profit, that pulling off its mask changed its name in “financial crisis”, the miserable locution with which hypocritically define the social unfairness, or the extreme difference and separation between wealthy and needy people.

Surely, it is true that in times of crisis many needy people tend to loose interest on anything not strictly necessary or functional to own subsistence or survival, forgetting about art, culture, ethics and knowledge, considering them superficialities, preferring instead the pragmatism of a job, money and food, the same concerns that throughout history distressed the slaves, the class ruled by the over-powerful, the serfdom, those who work for food, which nowadays is called food voucher. In many cases they are even unconsciously searching for self-destruction, in alcohol, in drugs or in gambling, perhaps in the false hope to solve their problems, but surely searching an escape or an reason for their chagrin. Indeed, those do nothing but to strengthen their chains or cages imprisoning them: it is not a wage that makes you free, but knowledge.
But also the wealthy people do not feel better, because for the most part they are the ones who have took advantage of the parasitical social system exploiting the others, who have thus neglected their own ethics, crushing human dignity in exchange of money, just like you squeeze grapes to get wine, at the call of “mors tua vita mea” and under the squalid sign “arbeit macth frei”, nazi docet. Such kind of people do not have a real interest for the human being, thus neither for his expression, his culture, his art; at most they admire his artisan virtuosity in manufacturing luxury objects to be flaunted as status symbols. Those kind of people care just for themselves, for lust, thus linger right on the same vices of the miserable ones: gambling, drugs and prostitution.
This is not mankind, but a system dominated by intellectual impoverishment, by the lack of respect, where both the ruler and the submissive worship the same god: money.

The world facts that anyone can get everyday from news, push this epoch toward the ravine always more in a runaway manner, at the point to make me doubt that it is still possible to change this state of things by the means of the sole sensitivity and elegance of an evocative art, that could wake sleeping people and make them to think, or to make over-powerful people to get a conscience. I do not give up, but it is necessary something more; that is the reason why I am now straightly speaking directly to the public, not without a bit of reproach, to collectors in particular.

The artists, the true ones, are the ones who do not have much of the guilt, instead in large part they are among the oppressed and the outcasts of the system.

The true artists are there: martyrs of the system, who self-immolate risking their own destiny in the name of freedom. Through them the spark of self-determination survives, their works are crystals, jewels where the soul of mankind is preserved inside, like swallowed in the amber, where we can read everything that is not written elsewhere, neither in the latest trendy novel, movie or commercial product. The true artists are the ones who are really free from the logics of market, the troubled, the delusional and dreamer, the naÏf, the bearer of a sincere inadequacy to marketing. Their works represent the essence of their times and characterise the true immortal artist of any epoch, he who has participated with struggle and genuine engagement to the representation of the events, pioneering searching the way to improve the society.

But the times are ripe, soon or later the world will jolt suddenly, as always happens, archiving this critical epoch, historicising it into a prospectus that will make it comprehensible to everyone. But we must act so that the culprits will be exposed and the big speculators will not repeat again their lies with which they inflated the many bubbles, the art one first, shilling art-goods that was functional to their short-sighting market logics. The big slaves of profit, ministers of lust foisting ethical annihilation, shall not find an incompetent and naïve public anymore.

The audience have to know that many collectors have been enmeshed and mislead by this system of flogging merchants accompanied by artists who are only searching for money creating works made on the purpose of marketing, without a personal or genuine feeling from the soul. You can understand well that in the long term such system is not maintainable, because founded on the speculative exploitation: a depleted plot of land at last is being abandoned.

Right the disappointed collectors could reopen the eyes, and work hard with personal intuition in order to oppose and invert the trend, subverting, rather making to crumble the speculative system, the art system that deceived them, favouring a personal supportive patronage guided by own instinct in the search for those puzzle tiles that compose the true history of the mankind free from schemes, that are those artists who love art more than themselves.

Only this way the large puzzle of art history will be a portrait of the free man, not the slave man.


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Death of a writer - Intellects stolen to freedom

I have come upon this old news dating back to 2010, but it is never too late to express one's own opinions if one feels the need; after all I already did that with artworks dating back to Renaissance and that emphasizes what I already stated in my analysis of Caravaggio's life.
Eron, a writer grew up on the street, who has with time merited appreciation and awards, obtained institutional engagements and participations in many important events, in 2010 he painted the ceiling of a church, not covertly, but under commission. He has been the first writer in the world to decorate a church, and as far as I know, luckily the last.

People are free to choose what to do, but this case has come to the betrayal, sadly denoting that, with time, almost always the success corrupts and mollify anyone, although Eron has never been one of the extremer writers.
The hip-hop movement, the graffitism, the street art and the urban culture, have always been folk expressions of dissent, strongly connoted by the denounce, often ironical or satirical, but undoubtedly against the injustices and the hegemonies of the power.
With all the empathy for the art that Eron have managed to express in the beginning, is it still the case to call himself a writer? It is not for chance that since then his artistic deeds have become very nostalgic.

We are assisting to many examples of flexure: excessively poetical or inconclusive writers, monkeying that kind of “abstentionist” contemporary art, that have no courage to say anything that is not politically correct, loving just technical virtuosismo and aestheticism, the practice of style.
Dear writers, awake, be strong and inflexible, today more than ever the power that relegates people to ghettos is corrupting also the minds, trying to put to sleep any form of dissent.

We can not justify saying that to decorate a church one can not propose inadequate topics, because the essential point is right that one should have not served his work to adorn a church, for even Vatican, today more than ever, is part of that political system of connivance with the strategies of power that are responsible for all the injustices and the evils against which the writers, at least some, have always fought for. Wouldn't have been better to denounce some scandal with a nice unauthorized graffiti?
This example from Eron seems right an episode that is functional to the interference, or the millennial intrusion, of the clerical power into Art, which is, and it must be, a free sentiment of the human expression, individual, not subjected to required adjustments of the contents (self-censorship) and to the allures of rewards from the commissioners.
Right since that year and in later times, this process of infiltration made by religion into the artistic dimension have regained new strength, either with the convocation to a convention for many influential artists by Benedict XVI, and with the very actual debut of Vatican Pavilion at the 55th Art Biennial of Venice (that we will review soon) guided by Cardinal Ravasi, who said: “we must rebuild the interrupted dialogue between art and faith”, obviously to bend this very powerful tool of persuasion, perhaps gone out of their control, to the wills of power.
The Church in the millennia has stolen the best artists from their free expression, being in power to bribe them with its immense treasures, making them famous and rewarding them with its gold, that it has used for this reason with a coercing method, instead of the sake to free people and the souls.
Spirit does not need a Church, which serves just the materialism of power.

But, let us analyse the artwork: Eron paints a very beautiful and photo-realistic sky, even though with some grey clouds heralding rain; just below he places on the eave an excellent trompe l'oeil representing a writer with cherub wings who is going to draw stylized golden doves flying up to reach their realistic representations that librate on the sky painted in the ceiling.
I do not know if our author consciously wished to express a precise concept with this mural or if he let himself to be carried away by his lyricism and his touch working in a religious place, but what I see in this artwork is the death of the writer, his renunciation to rebel to power: a writer, alone and grey, stands on a eave, typical tòpos of the suicide jumper, painting some doves, all along a symbol for the flight of the soul and of sacrifice, and hence of death. To me the message is more than clear: writers, you are in a dangerous position, stop dissenting and bow to the power.


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Robot artists and artist robots - The swamp of technique

An Artist should be esteemed not for the technique, but firstly for what he communicates.

Technique is just a tool or an aesthetic ornamentation, and not the aim. That artist who makes of technique his only strength, declares to be an executor, an artisan, a labourer, a machine: he is a robot artist.
And it will soon come the moment for the artificial art, sorry for the etymological pun. Then, hordes of artist robots could supply stylistically artistic contents restlessly and of infinite varieties, even on demand, tailored and in short times. The robot artist will be replaced directly by the purchaser, that is the commissioner, while the artist robot will be the worker. Then, who will search for the robot artists, whom in comparison will be just clumsy and pricey emulators of the more perfect machines?

This robotic application may seem even redundant for it emulates what is already done by painters of flesh and bones, but we must consider the economical potentialities as the technology progresses, and above all, yet from the few experimental samples, we can glimpse and imagine new possibilities that a person may hardly reach, slowly at high costs.
An artist could also take advantage of an artist robot, but obviously what he will propose to the public will not be the technical artwork, but just the intellectual one, as it should be since ever with all those artists who commend the making of their ideas to specialized labourers, a custom that in my opinion is ethically unbecoming anyway.

To pursue the technique leads to become addicted to it, in the perennial chase for the surmount to avoid exclusion. Instead, Art is to think, to say and to act freely, being etymologically derived from the Arian root ar that means to go, to move, to act; the obsession for the technique is just a swamp that limits freedom.

Nowadays, with the support of technology, almost everybody can boast artistic attitudes, believing amiss that to be able to technically execute an artwork is the aim. But the intent that motivates to express oneself is missing, after all even animals can learn to draw.

A technical comparison with machines built by ourselves to surpass our possibilities is meaningless, other than to be a losing game. That is the case of the chess game, where the computers, programmed by humans, have definitively defeated the possibilities of human beings, who have recently renounced, cleverly, to duel again with them.
The difference between human mind and the computer is that the first is incline to error, used as a genial and creative spark. In the unfailing computer we could emulate even this characteristic, but it will always be a machine programmed to emulate, while the metaphysical mystery of human mind is the free will, at all costs. This is at last the aim: freedom, the being stands out because he is free, he is not a machine or a labourer. To worry about technique limits the possibilities to act and possibly it could make you obsolete.

It is better to care of own thought and to keep it free, to listen to own nature and to be possibly esteemed for that, either manifesting it through artistic actions or not.


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Art as a store of value - Invest before the collapse

At the verges of a global crisis, which, in some ways, heterogeneously involves the several social classes, for everybody it is perhaps coming the point of no return, where we will wake up from a long dream (or nightmare) and we will found ourselves with money without any value, thanks to a people awareness made possible by the new media.
The rich leaders and the henchmen of the financial, institutional and governmental world, by now are enjoying a superior wealth thanks only to their higher autonomy granted by the speculative bubble that they have built, but soon or later the crisis created by them will fall upon them back in an apocalyptic way; for this reason some potentates tend to dissipate as more as possible their own monetary “opulences”, guzzling and dissipating as in the orgies before an imminent end of the world, because soon it will be no more possible, after the house of cards will have collapsed.

In the later years, and always more dramatically until today, in the world’s most famous auction houses, artworks are sold one after the other with amazing new record prices never reached before.
After the announcement of the new record for “No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue)” by Mark Rothko sold by Sotheby’s for more than 75 millions of dollars, today Christie’s hits the record for the biggest sale of modern and contemporary art of all times, earning more than 412 millions of dollars, beating the as much amazing sale of the day before made by Sotheby’s for a total of 375 millions.
Six artworks sold for more than 20 millions each, and 55 artworks in 67 have all surpassed one million dollars.

As seen that the museums are mostly ailing and contemporary art is living the most difficult period since after-war, these millionaire buys can’t be motivated by the meagre economic returns given by the exhibitions of that artworks; let alone by the love for art from bored busybodies of economy who see it just as a source of investment.

The true reason for we are seeing this frenzy for buy even at enormous prices by who has that monetary capacities, it is simply to get rid as fast as possible of the money that indeed it is virtual (90% of circulating money is not covered by real values whatsoever), converting it in material goods, in a tangible value, this is to say, converting the ripe of the monetary speculation before that, being in the edge of a financial global collapse, it will become waste paper; and when for a financial institute it may be just usual conversion into a real value of money that is indeed false, for the common people it will be a matter of not losing all those small savings laboriously earned.

Many may know well my dissent against who sees in art only a market phenomenon, or trendy, or a way to make investments, but it is not possible to deny the absolute value that an artwork represents indeed: the human expression is a cultural value, all along the culture creates knowledge, salvation and skills, and the artwork is the tangible manifestation of it. All along the work of human intellect has represented something that can be even exhibited as a symbol of one’s own acquired cognition, be of a power as of a personal chord, as they were for example the recherché Livre d’Ore in the ancient times.

After the sub-prime mortgages crisis, even the big financial institutes are desperately searching for store values other than the “brick and mortar”, now fallen into the speculative bubble too, with which to convert their dangerously unstable money. The watchword is buy!, buy!, buy! Getting rid of money is right enough.
Also the small collectors should perceive these badly dissembled signals from who is driving the world of economy, and acquire artworks (or other goods) according to their capabilities, perhaps profiting the crisis to pre-empt artworks from new artists at reduced prices.

One could only risk to escape the economy collapse.


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Who is the Art Critic?

What is the Art Critic's role? We all know that the Art world may be subdivided in two big subsets: the artists and the public. Thus we may say that the Critic belongs to the public, since he is a beholder. Hence, in its role of observer he is an individual who place himself over all the other observers, raising his voice to guide the other's opinion, to explain and to suggest them what they can't see.

In saying this, we can understand that indeed the Critic's role is not purely necessary; in fact often Art arises from the intimate need of the Artist to communicate directly to whom wants to listen, to they who adopt even temporarily the role of observers; and sometimes it arises also just from the need of the Artist to sublimate his own feelings not to necessarily transmit them to the others.
Nowadays, the critics have imposed the role thanks to their elocutionary skills most of the times rhetorical and adulatory because commissioned and paid, unto the creation of those contemporary think tanks that have managed to drive people in their artistic choices, placing themselves to a level of importance in many cases even overriding the artworks, in fact many artists recruit famous critics to impose themselves.
Really few critics dare to act their role of “active beholder” in a independent way, manifesting their judgement freely, either positive or negative, like recently the notorious Critic Gillo Dorfles has denounced, who has the authority to rebuke the others from the height of his 102 years and his ambivalent status of Critic and Artist.

After the artistic revolution of the Renaissance that saw the dawn of the modern Artist (who emancipated from the role of artisan subordinated to the will of the commissioners to that of a self-determined intellectual), today may we assist at the new revolution of the artists that are emancipating also from the hegemony of the critic?
Perhaps it is already so: the self-referentiality and the crypticism of many artists seem to confirm that; yet, the arduous comprehensibility of their artworks has given birth to throngs of critics that analyse them, but even this confirms that the critics belong to the beholders' sphere, bringing in fact the criticism to the same level of the comments and the opinions made by the public facing the true fulcrum over which all the art world is spinning: the Artwork.
This natural subdivision between artists and the public, where the Critic becomes again a peer of all the other beholders, is evident in the contemporary dissenting movement against the critic, for which many artists refuse the idea that their work may be introduced by mercenary critics, and even more often the same Artists attend to the autonomous production of the critical text of his own artworks, facilitating their reading and to emphasise his social commitment in the wish to communicate with the public.

As much as a Critic may have chords, merit certificates, academic qualifications or prestige, he will always be a beholder in the public, unless his own feeling and his disquisition at some point will show such a sincere and disinterested passion that the derived produce, the criticism, will become an artwork too.

The Critic may be seen indeed as a player of the art world who is located in a limbo between artists and public: only when his expression is animated by a sincere and disinterested movement of the soul, his criticism may rise to the status of creation, transporting him from the role of beholder in the public to the role of Artist; an Artist whose expression is conceptual and whose discipline is the literature.

The “true” Art Critic does not exist: he is a sublimating figure in the transition from beholder to Artist.

All the others are just pensionary rhetors.


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The jester artist
Art is not entertainment

Preface

Saying that in this epoch we witness a loss of values, a spreading of superficiality, status symbols and impoverishing consumerism, may perhaps seem just rhetoric, senile dotard's nostalgia.
Indeed, the advance of the human society fluctuates continuously; since the beginnings man has always wandered between the two antithetical horizons: soul and body, reason and instinct, being and appearance, love and psyche.
If i am here to defend the being, the reason, is because i feel there is the need for it, before that Art, first and last chance of the human being, will be in a tight corner; it is necessary to correct the heading where we are going too fast, and to find again an equilibrium.

The jester artist

Figure present in human society since ever, the jester has a peculiar task of his own: the entertainment; the jester is therefore the archetype of all the professions related to that.
Traditionally, the profession of the jester is often poor (as in the case of the "street artists"), and sometimes rich (as in the case of illusionists like David Copperfield); it has been the profession of those people who, having no purely productive skills, or finding themselves in scurvy conditions, were venturing in doing the buffoon at the court of nobles trying to animate their evenings in the hope to obtain providential alms; or even in the public squares, sometimes exposing themselves to the cad's plebeian derision.
Being that jester a wealthy prestidigitator, or a famous singer, or a begging "street artist", the very heart of his role does not change: entertain the beholder for livelihood (now i do not ever consider the role of other jesters of the mainstream entertainment, who have also other purposes, not only the economic gain).

Contrarily to the jester, the Artist, as we know it since Renaissance up to now, decides to express himself. As i always uphold, it is necessary that the artists have an ethics of his own that is not built around the need of his own economic sustenance, to impose himself commercially; in other words, for this sake, they must not conform their own Art to the liking of the audience, to the market trends, to the art collecting, to the fashion or the customer's requests.

The work of Art must not become entertainment.

Today we are the witnesses of several attempts to make us to recognize as Art all the proliferating design materials born within the commercial entertainment, such as movies and video-games (not talking about the design of commercial goods: mere attempt to pass the compulsory impulse to consume as a cultural virtue); that is very dangerous.
It is necessary that everybody, artists and public, think about that. Art must be kept free from the mechanisms of that production that needs to please the public; that would be as to begin a discussion giving always the reason to the interlocutor: thing absolutely useless, hypocritical and prejudicial; absolutely, that is not the purpose of Art.

Let us take for example a movie: it is a work made by a commercial company, but rare exceptions (which anyway almost never reach the theatres); it is a product having as first purpose to produce a profit, and to achieve it, almost as a rule, firstly it will have to please the audience (i pass over what would really want the audience and what would be indeed a conditioning). When a movie does not produce profit, as much as it wastes the initial investments, it is considered a flop, and it will be detrimental to the working career of who made it.
From this point of view, a colossal movie in the theatres or a "living statue" in the street are the same thing.
And that same thing is also the artwork of that Artist who, craving to self impose commercially, subdues his own creativity to the game of the entertainment, to the likes of the audience: a pandering.

Coming back to the commercial entertainment topic, the materials of the products are often property of the multinational corporations that financed them: in many spheres, the artists taking part in the making of the product can not even be individuated, ending up anonymously in the cauldron of a special-effects house of productions; a little like it may be for the Milan Cathedral, of which the countless workers are conjoined in this colossal collegial work of religious promotion: comprehensibly, nobody says "i am looking to a work realized by the many: Michelino da Besozzo, il Cerano, Vincenzo Foppa, Leonardo da Vinci, Cristoforo de' Mottis, Simone d'Orsenigo, Giulio Cesare Procaccini, etcetera etcetera..." but they say "i am looking to the Milan Cathedral", maybe just recalling the archbishop who commissioned its construction.

Today the commercial entertainment has been put under trial by the crisis tasted by all the "westernized" world, or better the "system", in other words his market economy; and that has involved also Art, although above all that art subdued to the system, this is to say that has let the profit to win.

True Art will never die; perhaps artists may decline, but not the true Art, at least until there will be one person who appreciates it.
But, if in this epoch, all the art is living a phase of inertia, it is not only the global crisis to be blamed, but also because too many artists have really lost ethics, that of the true Artist who acts for passion.
It is useless if many try to simulate a lyrical torment fallen from the sky in order to entice the most intellectual customers: they may deceive one person now, but not everybody always; the Artist's status is reached only in the deep of one's own personality, with sincerity to oneself.
The beholder who in his deep sincerely loves Art, or in other words putting aside the crave for possession or investment, is an emotional and smart person, as mush as how may or should be the Artist; that person can love and hate the expression of the human intellect; thanks to the sensibility spirit he can easily recognize the falseness. The pandering game of the market and the insincerity of a complaisant art are being unmasked, and after several decades of this prostitution game, love perishes, one realizes he has been deceived, and the true love has been betrayed. The disappointment takes over, then the dislike.

"ideoque philosophi sunt quodammodo pictores atque poetae, poetae pictores et philosophi, pictores philosophi et poetae, mutuoque veri poetae, veri pictores et veri philosophi se diligunt et admirantur;" - Iordanus Brunus Nolanus
"and therefore philosophers are in some way both painters and poets, poets are painters and philosophers, painters are philosophers and poets, thus the true poets, the true painters and the true philosophers esteem and admire one each other;" - Giordano Bruno

Now, the artists, to regain trust, must prove to be real, sincere persons.

Nevertheless, obviously, there will always be a market that continues to scream the price for an authorial falseness. Anyway, sincerity will be useful for everybody, at least to separate the wheat from the darnel (after all, there is always who loves the latter).

Then, the very risk is that in this epoch we are witness of a slow accustoming to the idea that Art is just an entertainment phenomenon (both mass or niche) as an alternative to an evening at the cinema, or a rainy Sunday at the mall: pay the ticket hoping in an adequate fun. One may notice how many museums of institutional grade, sometimes prefer to resort to the exhibition of the most extravagant artists: with all the respect for the personal expressions of these artists, that is due to the need to let Art become a phenomenon for circus booths, an exhibition of absurdities, a gallery of horrors, with the purpose to raise the curiosity of the big masses indifferent to Art, and then to make cash with more tickets.
In the vicious mechanism of "supply and demand", common to market and entertainment, even the artists are pushed to opportunistically dare an insincere eccentricity, in order to be considered by the trend of the mainstream entertainment.

Besides the sincerity of the artists, also the education of the public will do the difference.

At last, i would emphasize that, considering Art as a form of communication, it does not exist an absolute opposition between artists and non-artists, actors and public, chosen ones and profane ones; acts do exist, persons do exist, who create artworks that are made for other persons.
The work of Art is a debate, between who in that moment takes the role of Artist and the others who in that moment look at him; in fact, who often likes to have the role of Artist, in the rest of the time loves to be also a beholder.

Everybody can express hiss own thought becoming Artist, touching those strings that only Art can make to vibrate. Not necessarily with painting only, but with any mean.

"If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint." - Edward Hopper

There's the need to understand one thing: as a confirmation for the fact that Art is communication, an Artist, as presumptuous as he may appear, is often searching for a debate with the public, maybe calling attention or provoking a conflict. Fundamentally, the Artist "speaks" because he wants to discuss with the society, he wants to open a conversation.
The jester artist, instead, wants to open your wallet.


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The deception of the Art
Understanding the perception of reality

Many people know that famous anecdote about the fourteenth-century painter Giotto, who one day, still a student at the bottega, painted a fly on the nose of a figure frescoed by the teacher Cimabue; the fly was so much well painted that the teacher acknowledged the trick only after having tried to send it away with the hand several times.
Cimabue fell in the deception of his student, and for this he considered him an already skilled artist superior to himself.
This anecdote is perhaps the most classical example that remembers us that the Art manifests itself as deception, and that the artist is the one who realize this deception to the best.

To say the truth, the Artist is just an accomplice of this deception, because the deceiver is in primis the image in itself: the image is deception, it is a virtual, partial, relativistic and interpretative representation.
In fact, with the word artifice we also intend a mystification.

Anyway, as we will see, the deception given by the Art offers a positive opportunity in favour of the observer.

In the history of the Art, the deception has been a constant presence and there are examples even in the frescos of ancient Greece.

In the same epoch, the philosopher Plato was posing the question about the deception given by the image, and of how the sensorial perception can deceive our sense of the reality.
In his "myth of the cave" he hypothesizes the condition of a person confined since the birth in the bottom of a dark cave, and chained in such a way that he can see only a wall of the cave in which his jailers, hidden behind a wall, are projecting the weak shadows of shapes, animating them in front of a fire.
This person, having never seen the world outside, would believe that the reality is made of those shapes and the resounding echoes. This person, if brought out of the cave by that time in advanced age, he would have an unbearable trauma in denying his "reality", and in front of the opportunity to opt for a world of blinding light he probably would prefer to return to his "normal" condition of segregation.

The myth of the cave let us to understand that man is naturally given to the belief in his sensorial perception. Plato, as the artists, cares to warn the people from this deception.

The deception in the visual arts was called with the term Trompe-l'œil (deceiving the eye) only starting from the Baroque period, epoch that saw the triumph of this kind of paintings and frescoes, which were the fruit of the studies about perspective divulged starting from the Renaissance. The Trompe-l'œil had various intents: to make rooms to seem wider or to simulate openings on the ceiling toward the sky thanks to false sights; to enrich the architectures with decorations cheaper than the sculptural ones, like false friezes, columns, statues and windows (technique used still nowadays that takes the name of quadraturism); or as jokes of giottesque kind; and obviously as simple demonstrations of one's own pictorial virtues.

Today the pictorial art of deceiving the eye is a little old-fashioned, because the advent of the photography (and then of the three-dimensional graphics) has vanished the last goal of the hyper-realistic painting, relegating it in the purest technical virtuosity.

In a period that has seen to grow the interest for the photography, the famous surrealist painter René Magritte, remembers us the teaching of Plato, that the image is a deception. Magritte, and all the Surrealism, founds his Art upon this concept of mendacity of the image; a concept expressed in a direct and emblematic way by his most famous painting "La trahison des images" (The betrayal of the images), which brings the attention of the beholders on the fact that the represented one on the canvas is not a pipe (but it is the image of a pipe).

Again, about the middle of the XX century, another artistic movement was devoted in a more specific way to the visual deception: it was the Op Art or Optical Art, which uses true optic illusions to put the observer in front of the dimensional paradoxes.
Again the Art puts us in front of the deception of our senses, but above all of how even the brain is fallacious.

Anyway the Art and the artists, as Plato too, care about making the beholder conscious of this deception; and to do this it uses the same deception. It is not therefore fate if today the contemporary Art does it not only visually, but also conceptually, using that "intellectual spurs" proper of the philosophers.

In the modern Art this will to unmask the deception of the image is present more and more, just like it was almost a self-criticism, a denounce of its own capability to deceive.
This happens in all the artistic disciplines, for example in the sculptures of people that seem true, created by artists like Duane Hanson, before, and then Ron Mueck: in a technological evolution started with the wax statues, these artists realize human figures of fibres or polymers of the extraordinary realism, even being subjects that are evidently false and surreal.

These sculptures do not have just the purpose to deceive the observer to the end, because they represent situations often impossible or in a lower or higher scale than normal, even though visually realistic. These artworks want to vivify intangible ideas, philosophical and metaphysical intuitions, materially putting them in front of us. In this kind of artworks it is evident the will to make the deception of the Art an opportunity of cognitive elevation, of perceptive emancipation. Vivifying the unreality, the beholder, unaware or forgetful of the deception, comes to understand the narrowness of his perception of the reality.

Also the Swiss duo Peter Fischli & David Weiss realizes absolutely realistic sculptures of common objects and whole furnitures reproduced in polymeric fibres and manually painted, in order to then compose them in installations that seem real messy and dirty places: they are sculptural Trompe-l'œil. But in this case, differently from Hanson and Mueck, and apart the conceptual and social values of the proposed subjects, the will to deceive the observer is total: the deception is revealed only by the knowledge to be in front of reproductions, or by the artwork labels.

Also Thomas Demand is another contemporary artist who works with the perceptive deception: his artworks consist in photographs of rooms that seem absolutely real, but that indeed they are photos of models realized with common cardboard. In this case the perceptive deception has two stages: the material reproduction and the photographic one. Also those painters that portray from photographs subject the reality to two different stages of reproduction.

Also the photography and the cinema are arts of the illusion and of the deception. Many believe that the photography is absolutely a truthful medium, that represents the reality as how it is, as much as to be used as incontestable proofs in a trial.
But the photographic realism and the cinema Neorealism do not exist: the cinematographic or photographic device is always a method to do samplings, to mediate the reality, moreover it is used by a human being that has an own vision of the reality, and therefore he will make choices even unwilling.
The most serious lack of these media consists in omitting the totality of the reality, because they are finite windows, they are partial visions, both in time and in space, from which an image of the reality filtrates: the image which is deception.
An evident example of mystifying photograph is the famous case of "Le Baiser de l'Hotel de Ville" by Robert Doisneau, of which i have already talked in this file-card of the Collection.

The important thing is not much if the artwork represents or not the reality of things, but it is the message that brings, even thanks to the deception: the image must be considered for what it communicates, but not pretending that it have a bond with the reality.

In the cinema, which is perhaps the most deceptive of the arts, it is again exposed the classical myth of the cave. Films like "The Matrix" by the Watchowski brothers do not do nothing more than to bring back again the fundamental idea of Plato, modernizing it with situations more suitable to the modern era. In "The Matrix" as in other films of the kind, like "The Truman Show", he who is "took out of the cave" sees the ruin of his own world of imagination which is surely more inviting, perfect and pleasant than the crude reality, and like in the myth he could prefer the cave.

From "The Matrix" it is an instant to reach the latest frontier of the deception: the Virtual Reality, that however today represents that territory in which the Art loses the ability to warn of the deception of the image, being that the special dominion of the serpentine will, fortunately of scarce success, to propose the deception as alternative reality, often to redeem an oppressive real life.
This way, in the Virtual Reality are rising more and more sparkling and inviting worlds, communities of souls that choose their own platonic cave.

Also in the Nature the perceptive and sensorial deception is in use, but in this case we are speaking about mimesis aimed to the survival: the creatures defend themselves with mimicry and camouflage, both to escape the sight of the predator, and to look menacing to frighten it.

By the social point of view, the deception given by the perceptive fallacy is an aspect of our psyche that is academically studied and exploited for commercial purpose: from the advertising, to the subliminal messages, to the multi-sensorial stimulation that instils associations between consumer products and instincts.
Wanting to complete this panoramic view on the mystifying capability of the Art, also the beautician make-up is an example of social practice finalized to deceive the other, improving the look of a person, that is to say creating an artifice, an altered perception of the reality.

Revelation of the artistic deception

The image is deception; we may say: appearances are deceiving.

The Art is fiction, artifice, deception. But this deception is done for beneficent, humanitarian purpose: the deception of the Art is revealing by manifesting itself as what it is, therefore it becomes a warning that reveals the mystification.
The Art serves for this: to go beyond, to break the limits of the Virtual Realities, to shed a light in the cave making it visible to the people that sometimes find themselves imprisoned in it without their knowledge.

Since ever, the function of the Art is the one to go beyond and to bring back; it is the ability to see beyond the limits of our mystifying perception and to know how to prophetically communicate to whom is still trapped within that limits. As the primitive men made, telling to the others what they had seen in the grasslands, drawing it on the walls of the cave.


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Art per metre
(base in mm. + height in mm.) * coefficient

Nowadays in the art market the gallerists and the artists comply to this formula with which they determine the selling price of the artworks: the sum of base and height expressed in millimetres (or in centimetres adding a zero) is multiplied by the actual coefficient of the Artist, which expresses the value of that Artist.
That coefficient will grow in time as that Artist will make its way, and it may start with a fraction of one for the beginners, till to arrive to values of many tens for the biggest artists and the masters of the past.

But, does it have a meaning the method of evaluating the price of a work of Art depending on its sizes? Does it have a logic for correctness in defining prices, or is it a commercial ethic?
Or that is a blind computation based on the official quotation of the Artist, whatever it does, not taking under consideration other elements, such as: the peculiar beauty of a work in respect to another, the preciosity of the materials, the expression intensity, and the relative value that it can have for a certain buyer or the Artist itself; in this latter case is not it more logic the mechanism of the auctions where the best offerer wins?

In my opinion, in many cases the quotation per metre may influence the work of an Artist, because it may be constrained, at least for the lowest amounts, to the production of artworks that may fit into the expenses and the necessary engagement; yet, also pushing it to create following a production standard, this is to say, a seriality that may come to the repetition and the loss of imagination. It is not a coincidence that we can see a surplus of artworks that are more similar to a commercial mass product than a product of the genius that stands for its uniqueness.

Entitling this article "art per metre" does not mean that selling per metre is devaluing, but it is referred to the method per sé that takes under consideration only the Artist's person. In my opinion it is possible to find another way to value an artwork other than the Artists' signature.

I do not want to disbelieve that may there be who, painting in an invariable way, may standardize its own price with a coefficient per metre; but, the point is that for somebody it may confine them into the standardization of even the expression method, and the technique.

Besides, even to quantify the quality of an intellectual contribution in an artwork is a non measurable matter, since it is subjective; for this reason it would seem more logic the method of an auction sale.

Moreover, we must consider also that somebody may desire to create large or huge sized works in order to earn much with a minimum effort.

Another topic is the realization of a sculpture: its production cost is a preponderant factor, at least for the sculptures of large sizes that often require the work of more professionals. In fact, often these works are commissioned before the realization with a cost estimation enquire. Indeed the matter of sizes * coefficient applies to bidimensional arts.
But, if we would apply the method to sculpture, maybe talking of art per weight, we could make an example with ham: cured ham so much per weight and salami so much per weight; hence marble so much per weight and bronze so much per weight.
If we talk about materials there is nothing to except: the Artist charges the client for the material that constitutes the artwork, just as the car repairer charges you for the spare part. In the case of artists with very high quotations, the cost for materials represents anyway just a minimal part of an artwork's price.
Then, we could ask ourselves how much to value the other factors: contents, liking, subjective beauty, transmission of concepts or intellectual affinity; I do not consider the time and the commitment spent in the realization of an artwork, because in my opinion the ratio between time and commitment spent is proportional to the genius of the Artist: there is who in a short time makes an excellent artwork without efforts, and who spends much time and efforts for mediocre achievements; shortly: only the result is important.

Surely the Artist may take on the responsibility to be more or less marketable, choosing higher or modest quotations and determining the prices at will, but, in a market system that contemplates the use of the method sizes * coefficient, a gallerist does not even consider other possibilities, rejecting the Artist too pricey or not much fruitful, that is not generating profit.

And going beyond: if the coefficient with which the price of an artwork is determined would determine also some parameters artistic-expressive such as creativity, poetics and concepts, then who can arrogate the right to decide for the buyers what is the size of their appreciation, of their likes? And here it is: we arrive to the salient point: nobody may decide how much could be worth an artwork and there is no mathematical method to pre-establish its price, which is revealed only with the issue from the negotiation between who is giving the artwork and who in buying it.


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The Artist with capital letter
An eminent individual

You may have noticed that I am used to write Artist with the initial capital letter; this may seem excessively presumptuous, but it does not deal with the attribution of whatsoever supreme aura to a person.

Sure that it is quite sumptuous to read "the Artist" instead of "the artist", and I cannot conceal that the capital letter is also refined, but above all it is useful to underline the role of that individual that believe to be or is defined an Artist; in the society this role is in my opinion very important.

This is a matter of equality with the other figures of the culture's world, of the social roles and duties.
If it is true that one cares to write Engineer, Manager, Professor, Doctor, Teacher and Bishop, I don't understand why one could not use the capital letter for an Artist.
Among the artists, hierarchies do not exist: any artist can be an Artist.

The modern artist, the one born with the Renaissance, has assumed an active role in the intellectual evolution of the society bringing his own personal contribution, contrarily to what previously happened, for which the artist was considered just an artisan, an executive worker.

So, are the artists perhaps social figures less important than a Manager or an Engineer? I would really say not.
Or the difference perhaps is in the fact of having obtained or not academic degrees? No, the artistic activity surely cannot drown in the swamp of this classism for bureaucrats: the Artist, at least the one that I consider worthy to have the capital letter, is a person who makes a research, either metaphysical and spiritual or practical and materialist, and brings it to the society.

The Artist has a very important role; it could seem that only the politicians, the religious people, the scientists and the soldiers are changing the world, but it is also true that often just one artwork of an Artist can change the way of thinking of even millions of people: just think about the singers, the directors, the writers.

The Artist is one of the many individuals searching for an active and eminent role in the evolution of the human society. Hence it deserves to be considered as it is due. At least for the courage to have chosen a way not always easier than others.

Anyway, at last do not forget that, as a Professor or a Cardinal, also the Artist would not exist without the estimable Public (with capital letter).


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The inheritance of Futurism
From the apex one can descend or fly away

The Futurism, what it was, a movement looking into the progress, with no respect for the stillness, hymning to the frenzy of the creation, of the conquering of new peaks.

In 2004 Osvaldo Peruzzi died; he is considered the last Futurist. The last? It seems that this movement is by now dead, however it is founded on a fundamental concept which is valid in any epoch: the progress, not wanting to necessarily define it a positive thing. How the Futurism has evolved? Where it has gone? In what it has transformed to?

The GAMeC of Bergamo (Italy) in this period proposes a big exhibition entitled "The future of the Futurism", placing the Masters of that movement side by side to contemporary artists, somehow looking for connections.

However my opinion is that we live in an epoch of afterthought; generally the Art potentially shows an introspective personality, of existential contemplation, of pondering.

The reason for this hesitation of the artistic expression is because the contemporary western society is already living an epoch founded on this Futurism.
Firstly we have to imagine the epoch that preceded the Futurism, before the XX century, and also antecedently, before the industrial revolution: the individual rhythms seemed to flow slowly, the people had a relaxed behaviour and the pondering of the concepts was a custom; in this context the Futurism rose, like a wish to accelerate, to shift the statics humankind, even in the danger to provoke its collapse.

Here it is, the Futurism has shifted the society, or at least it has been witness of its dangerous agitations. The contemporary society was born therefore exactly from those disquietudes, and in fact it has assimilated the Futurism, used as a fundamental part of its own culture.
The contemporary western society is Futurism: techno-music, high speed, we all live with a chronometer on the wrist, prey of the anxiety to lose the opportunities, we all produce without control, we all accelerate in every field with scorn of the danger, we all act careless of the consequences, we all have no time. Having an aid also from the affirmations of ancient memento mori, the modernity has pushed us to move anywhere without rest.

Here it is, in this context proposing the Futurism does not make sense any more, because the Futurism is already the soul of the society. The Futurist mind has been already awarded by the economic and social structure, it has already known the glory.

And after having seen the apex of Futurism, for its sons perhaps now it is already time for a Pastism.


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Indolent world
How many beholders look beyond the appearance?

Let us admit it: it seems that the public at an Art gallery never linger to deepen the contents of the artworks. But Art is there also for that purpose; or maybe today we are in an epoch in which only the appearance counts and the value of an artwork is just the economic investment or as house decor?

Why people do not linger, do not deepen? Art, the one that in my opinion is worthy of the capital letter, has also the mission to show us new horizons, to make us to think and to intellectually interact.
Sure, It is not the only purpose, but in my opinion it is one of the most important.

The sign of the modern times? People do not have time, they do feel to have no time: they feel forced to frantically race, to pursue something unattainable, perpetually and without rest. "Who stops is lost" or "time is money" will be the epitaphs that will be written on the tombstone of this epoch?

Now I recall that vision of the Hell in the Divina Comedia by Dante Alighieri in which the cowardly people, for punishment, eternally run after a rag as ensign.
The torture reserved by Dante to the cowards is to pursue a "useless ideal", represented by a ragged and worn-out flag.

I do not want to say that today's people suffer from sloth, indeed the contrary; because they have to live the same situation of those damned in the Divine Comedy, but they suffer the torture in the earthly life without having ever been a sinner.

In fact the reason why the public do not linger in front of a work is not the laziness, indeed: it deals with a frenzy for something intangible, unknown.
Obviously to search for a purpose, to have a goal, is legitimate and necessary; however the frenzy to lose the possibility to find something better, does not allow to stand for a while and better evaluate all the possibilities.

Morally I do not think that people can be accused of sloth, because, in case, they are the victims of this frenzy. A slothful person is one who snuggles in his own laziness; we could define him an indifferent, a superficial. Indeed I think that this condition of the contemporary man is induced by the great diffusion of interested opinions of the economy.
Simply speaking we could say that many people do not know which way to turn, they are at the mercy of a total confusion.

In front of an artwork these people do not linger because confused and searching for something that they could easily recognize and give them a minimum of certainty, or an artwork that is direct, easily understandable.
Evidently their mind is overloaded and it answers only to what matches to the most tenacious engrams (the mnemonic memories unconsciously or compulsorily stored); it answers only to what is not overloading any further.

This is just an analysis, not a conclusion.


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Who wants to be a Videoartist?
Considerations on the concept of Videoart

Nam June Paik, Bill Viola and Matthew Barney are pre-eminently the names that every Videoart lover would mention without hesitation.

But what is the Videoart? Looking at what is proposed today, one would say that it is everything that deals with the moving pictures and Art.

Personally i believe that there is confusion, or at least that the term is misused to define any cinematic artwork.

The Videoart was born only four decades ago, yet today it has been already distorted, and many expressive techniques joined in it.
The Videoart was born with the appearance of the first television systems and the relative methods of video-recording.
Nam June Paik can be considered the father of Videoart; he has defined the two ways with which an artwork of Videoart can be enjoyed.

The first way is the simple and direct one for which the artwork is transmitted by a television screen; for example as in the video of Zbigniew 'Zbig' Rybczynski.

The second way is the one that expects the use of the television screen itself as a part that constitutes the artwork; in this case we are talking of Videoart installations. This is the way that characterizes the artworks by Nam June Paik.

In both cases the Videoart expects that the artwork is based on the use or the presence of video and television technologies.

We could mention for example also the commercial videoclips by Chris Cunningham, known for his collaboration with Aphex Twin. Many of his Cyberpunk style videos are artworks of Videoart in every aspect, because the video is at the base of their realization, of the fruition and sometimes also of the subject.

If we accept these parameters on which the Videoart has been founded, we realize that some artworks, today considered Videoart, indeed do not suit to this definition.

In fact today the Videoart seems to have become the cauldron where to include all the cinematographic artworks that still do not have a proper category, a proper definition.

Let us take for example the cycle "Cremaster" by Matthew Barney: where the video element is present? The video is absolutely not determinant: the artwork is too close to the cinematographic productions, and if it were a film or a theatrical representation it would not change much. In my opinion the series "Cremaster" needs a different definition; they are artistic films, experimental cinema or something that has not been defined yet.
Moreover "Cremaster" introduces all those characteristics typical of the cinematographic Art, that is to say they are artworks realized thanks to an establishment of different artistic disciplines, with the collaboration of different artists: scenography, lights, make-up, costumes, dance, et cetera.

If artworks like "Cremaster" can be defined Videoart, then it is Videoart the whole cinematography, including the films with super-heroes, sentimental dramas and comedies.

Do not misunderstand me: Matthew Barney is an Artist and i am not comparing him to that merely commercial films.
I am saying that the Videoart and the experimental cinema are different things; and a film with some intellectual contents, not easily comprehensible or with an eccentric aesthetics, is not necessarily Videoart. With Cremaster we estrange too much from the definition of Videoart, landing to an "artist's cinematography", as for example the one by David Lynch.

Cinematography, Videoart or what other? If we made to join all the animation visual arts in one only category, this would be too much generic. In the other hand definitions are used to define finite ensembles of things.


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Critiques

Art of Freedom 2 - collective art exhibition

Aran
Aran takes advantage of photo and videographic medium dedicating hinself to a careful and sensitive documentary research  with a humane and social depth. Showing that photographer’s analytic ability to catch the essence of things and render it evident through pictures, along with an interest for the historiographical and cultural reasons upon which events are founded, Aran tells with lucid objectivity the conditions of populations and people involved, placing at the centre of his research the free expression of the human being, the existential condition of the individual, as much humanely important as neglected or ignored by conformism, or oppressed by ideological totalitarianisms, particularly in the area of his country of origin, Iran, which is that complex basin of millenarian civilisations of Persia.

Lynn Bianchi
The awarded exhibition career and the extensive experience in the photographic and multimedia field of New Yorker artist Lynn Bianchi are revealed in refined visual poetics where the aesthetics of the subjects and scenes is characterised by harmony and gentleness, by detail and subtlety. Her artworks often represent a civil and social environment, but always in contact with the natural element, particularly connected with the sphere of femininity and its link with image. The taste of her pictures have in themselves the heritage of the great masters of the modern epoch, with atmospheres that range from surreal to an analytic visual realism, to the Dada wink, up to hints of a classical lyricism, everything always in the name of sensibility and fineness.

Guido Devadder
Guido Devadder surprises the beholder with an interdisciplinary art experimentation that he pursues to express his own semiological and intellectual research. Fond of drawing and hypnotic repetitions in Escherian style, Devadder creates animations reminding the trend of animated GIFs, similar for concision and conceptual immediacy, but developing more profoundly, beyond the bare visual effect and the aphorismatic reduction. Like a modern incarnation of the rotating magic lantern, the work in exhibition seems to be created with 3D graphics, but actually it is the recording of the rotary movement of a real printed sculpture. The work talks about an absurd abnegation, of the self-constrain in which human lives come in succession into a perpetual and vain procession toward the unknown, perhaps to keep a status quo although nobody knows who is the beneficiary, or just for a blind emulation of those who preceded us, a clear criticism and metaphysical analysis of an existence without ideals and solely materialistic.

Masha Eretnova
Attracted and educated to art since childhood, Masha Eretnova today professionally devotes herself to painting. The artist chooses to free herself from the representation of appearances, with an abstraction that is characterised anyway by a narrating ability expressed through the sign, to which she imparts a value of symbol, inasmuch extemporary expression of sentiments that rose as cognitions, as confirmed after all by the titles given to some of her artworks. The precise movement of the brush, with a perfectionist taste that brings uor mind to Shodō (the disciplined Japanese calligraphic art) translates concepts as much clear and real in the intimacy as hardly representable figuratively or using words. With a spontaneous pictorial gesture, Eretnova gives freedom of expression to the deep, imprinting latent pictures of her own cultural experience, where themes with social, existential and identitarian nature are sublimated.

Zizi Liu
In her multidisciplinary art expression, Zizi Liu frees herself from conditionings or stereotypes of traditional pictures and contents, creating innovative sculptural artworks and fancy paintings where she infuses a cheerful impression, an aesthetics that represents her own self, inspired by gracefulness, by warm and soft colours, emanating a comfortable energy, an harmony deriving from a search for equilibrium, from the balancing of weights and tones. Her artworks lie between the lightness of abstraction and the representation of forms that are vaguely biological, anthropomorphic, animal or floral, amusing and never pointy or aggressive, but docile and stylised, like the caricatured lines of cartoons, those lines with which we idealise the world and that today have become the collective imaginary that is common to several generations.

Katarzyna Łukasiewicz
Gifted of sensibility and quenchless curiosity, Katarzyna Łukasiewicz is involved in a careful and extensive research on the existential and humane condition of people in relation with their environment, the anthropic one, and the natural one in particular, as well as in relation with the portrait artist, who necessarily must have a strong aptitude for empathy and involvement, so to be able to catch the spirit without perturbing it. Her photo-documentary activity is sincere, realist and humble, and right for this it can grasp the magnificence of the human beings, who open up to the observer offering their intimacy, their expression as an individual, almost explicating their own ideals and the way to present themselves to the world, with the subtle language of body and personality. And in nudity we finally find the greatest openness of one’s own reality, as if it was in spite of that world made of conformism and hypocrisy.

Marcantonio Lunardi
Expert film-maker, director, and skilled in graphic arts as well, Marcantonio Lunardi excels in the creation of video and cinematographic artworks of remarkable beauty. Thanks to a competent use of instruments, a meticulous care in the research of perfection and a sensibility for the human sphere, Lunardi is able to render empathic and fascinating works, both charming and unsettling, conveying profound meanings through a symbolism that is inspired to the contemporary everyday life and to universal metaphors or classical allegories. Underlining a big dedication to the particular and the detail, the work in exhibition, with a disenchanted awareness and compassion, talks about the hard existential condition of the modern human being, who forgot the true essence of freedom, too often unconsciously repressed in the theatre of hypocrisies.

Tom Lundquist
Thanks to a great experience in the practice of classic and digital graphic techniques, carried out along a vast exhibition activity, Lundquist can offer to the beholder artworks that combine beauty and meaning. In the digital series dedicated to cyclists, Lundquist adopts one of the symbols that inspire the feeling of freedom, not just physical but also of thought. The bicycle gives a light heart and joy to those who use it to reach new horizons, a technologic instrument, as it is that of digital graphics, with which the artist can reach new levels of expression. Among Lundquist’s various artworks, we find subjects hanging between reality, surreal and metaphysical. Inspired by some science-fiction with a conceptual depth, Lundquist’s artworks recall the presence of thin spheres, worlds that from the everyday pseudo-reality of sensory appearance open up to the metaphysical, mathematical and geometric reality of cosmos.

Chris May
Proving his expressive and technical competence in several disciplines, up to mastering the most modern techniques of artificial intelligence, Chris May combines his original music and animation creations into sparkling multimedia artworks that catch the beholders from the first to the last moment. Extremely rich of detail and colour, May’s works often cross in a disruptive way the threshold of normality toward new dimensions of awareness, giving the sensation of strong emotional charge thanks to the profusion of evocative symbols, forms and sounds. Like an invitation to transcendental meditation, the exhibited artwork is a journey inside a fractal mandala, leading in a way as much energetic and compulsive as relaxing and liberating toward the search for the absolute, the infinite, starting with the elicitation of the memories of our existential experience.

Laura Migliorino
Like in the past works, also with the ones now in exhibition, from to the most recent series dedicated to books, Laura Migliorino shows a great interest for the existential condition of the individual, the depth of the most intimate emotional aspects of the human being, who faces a social reality often dominated by conformisms and impositions. We are dealing with a quest for proofs that can tell sincerely an existence free from stereotypes. Sometimes published pseudonymously, in order not to incur in the persecution of intolerance, the book is depository and depositary of that thought wishing to reveal itself to others, express its own reasons in a serene way, spontaneous and sincere. In this series, Migliorino documents the physicality of some books that often have been banned, as to confirm their real existence, not an electronic fabrication in the changeable and volatile era of internet.

Ruth Schmidt
Specialised in the oil painting, Ruth Schmidt demonstrates in her canvases an attentive perspicacity in the observation of society and human existence, and a sensibility for that original sentiment of natural harmony as well. Her artworks, showing a pleasant and balanced style, are allegories expressed through a symbolism as much light as profound in analysing the attitudes of people, sometimes interpreted in a nearly sarcastic way. With many prompts for an attentive beholder, several Schmidt’s paintings spur to the search for happiness by looking in the freedom given by the natural immediacy of simple things and beauty. Other artworks tickle the common sense, nearly mocking the world’s afflictions and the mind-bending lucubrations of people living in a world of illusions and pointless and self-destructive ideologies.

Lex Turnbull
Gifted of a great versatility in the most diverse artistic, technical, intellectual and cultural fields, Lex Turnbull’s art is interdisciplinary, multimedia and eclectic, and expressed through artworks with a light but profound spirit. Turnbull takes into account and challenges those preconceptions and social habits that are offsprings of a stereotyped world, crystallised in an imperturbable stagnation, by pinpointing its most emblematic symbols. Artworks like the one exhibited, subvert a preestablished system that, to a mind free to reason without conditionings, appears false, oppressing, boringly deviant and self-celebratory. Turnbull proposes a discussion on the subject under exam never being pitiless, but acting and reworking in a rational and placid way, searching the fallacy in its very essence, in the light of new cognitions.




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TransHumance - collective art exhibition

Iryna Calinicenco
Iryna Calinicenco, thanks to the experience grown in the field of design, is interested in the experimentation of digital art, creating graphics where she transforms common subjects and shapes into elaborate pictures with a particular texture enjoyable at many levels. These works seem clouds of particles or data still readable by human vision, as if the represented subjects were going to sublimate in a digitalisation process, sampled in a futuristic bar-code comprehensible by the electronic device, crystallised in a hybrid dimension between human and digital. Like in bar-codes, the line is the fundamental element chosen by Cairyna (her pseudonym) to create these artworks. In the series featuring the nude, Cairyna matches the digital world to the more proper human sphere: sensuality, evoking a feeling of absence due to the dematerialisation of the body, but also of possible new and still unknown virtual sensations.

Bobby Kim Ling Chen
Defining himself an outsider both in the art and digital fields, Bobby Kim Ling Chen shows a broad knowledge of digital new media and will of communicating his own philosophic experience. Bobby experiments with the always growing expressive possibilities allowed by the most recent technologies, and although his creations rely on computers and digital new media, he do not miss to raise questions on the role of the artist and the human being projected in a near future dominated by technology, looking for visual and aesthetics syntaxes to dialogue with a society that is by now largely digital-addicted. Still keeping an interest in traditional art, his artworks range from the reconsideration of manual techniques, to the synthetic image, to video art, to purely virtual art and NFT, to the metaverse, to interactivity, still with the aim of communicating concepts and feelings that are meaningful for the quality of the human condition.

Andrew Cheung
Andrew Cheung employs the traditional Oriental techniques of ink painting on paper to create evoking and empathic atmospheres dealing with existential, social and metaphysical themes with sensitivity. With a humanistic inclination, his subjects pivot around conscience, identity, intimacy, individuality, the relation with others and the cosmos, emotions and the perception of thin spheres. The exhibited artworks deal with the topic of prosthesis, subtly evoking that pain, whether psychological or physical, in memory of that moment when someone crosses the point that implies the loss of the physical wholeness. The lines define bodies that keep the essential element of identity, the visage, but seem to loose their way like free synapses, like rivers where the spiritual essence flows, in some sort of an estranging run, alienating from matter, in order to being able to contemplate it from above, to know its meaning.

Martin Del Carpio
A versatile artist, Martin Del Carpio through LOS recounts about the nightmare that many fear it could become real with transhumanism: the loss of humanity, the empathy toward our own kind. The man turned into an apathetic automaton may even seem the stereotype seen in many works of the past, but unfortunately by now it is already what a sensitive person can notice every day in those people ruled by protocols, by compartmented jobs, by the digitalisation of the person, who are unable to act outside the schemes imposed with the extortion of fines by a system that handles them through mass control and company apps, so that they are essentially programmed like robots. The regimented men do not respond any more to their own human needs, but only to rules, they look at their peers who suffer with a kind of contempt. Gears that just have to function, not thinking about the breaking point, as they will be replaced anyway.

Elina
After an education in the fields of art and design, Elina ventures in the digital arts and new media growing a particular interest in video art and installations. In the video “Butterfly”, with the simple juxtaposition of non-manipulated pictures, she poses a profound consideration on the earthly existence and on the transience of the physical body, but with the certainty of the metaphysical and immortal nature of the spirit, on whose will life generates. The butterfly metaphor suggests that the human being is nothing but a cocoon that regenerates through lineage. With lightweight poetry and romanticism the artwork contrasts with the materialism that induces people to hope in transhumanism, starting from the intimate question on the whys of things, but also providing the answer: metamorphosis, evident allegory of the butterfly, also symbol of attraction and femininity, and of the ability of women to recreate and rework life.

Ian Haig
Ian Haig, an interdisciplinary artist attentive to the evolution of sociological trends and an expert in the digital scene since its inception, deals with technology and sociopolitical themes of the contemporaneity with a pronounced disillusionment, materialising them in an extreme aesthetic research combined to a disruptive conceptual strength, realistic to the point of seeming cynical. An unready observer may be shocked by his artworks, but their purpose is not to scandalise or raise clamour, indeed to reawake the mass conscience, too often dozed by narratives that the system deploys to make people accept and justify realities that otherwise would be unacceptable, in that process called of normalisation, that is the manipulation of critical judgement. In his artworks the conceptual principle is manifested in the flesh and with blood, tangible expressions of life, but also made of pure energy.

Magdalena Hejzlarová
An eclectic artist, Magdalena Hejzlarová is devoted to an expressive research that takes under consideration collateral aspects of mass culture and the stereotyped imaginary, investigating on the possibilities of thought, with a particular focus on the sensitivity of the intimate and the escape from the ordinary. The awarded video artwork “Until exhaustion” captures the beholder inside abstract metaphysical atmospheres inducing an almost hypnotic state of meditation, through the animations generated by Golly (updated version of a microcomputer application dating back to 1970, known by most people as Life, that simulates the cellular evolution.) In these abstract landscapes, like Petri dishes where digital cells move, swarming pixels are being born then die in a Brownian way, as if they were crawling in a cosmos ruled by chaos, suggesting a randomness of life, which is indeed causal, pushed by a will in all its infinitesimal parts.

Erika Kassnel-Henneberg
Practising several art disciplines, Erika Kassnel-Henneberg conducts a conceptual research focussed on perception, in the relation between Self and cosmos. Her artworks raise questions on a fluid, relative and subjective reality, on how we consider the others and things, and how we think we are considered for our features. In the video “Homunculus” the artist utilises the ability of artificial intelligence to create unlimited and perfectly photorealistic faces, animating these persons who however do not exist, boggling the beholder’s mind and hindering the chance to judge reality. A being made of appearance alone, that is possible thanks to these new algorithms of digital graphics, opens to new scenarios where certainties fade away, posing us several questions. What are we to others? What others are? Could an avatar or artificial clone of ours substitute us? And could we ever be happy with just the appearance of others?

Lucien.Art
Interdisciplinary artist with an expertise in new media and information technology, Lucien.Art successfully devotes herself to several fields, both technological and artistic, developing and experimenting with state-of-the-art digital tools. The aesthetics of her works perfectly embodies the lightness and sheen of the virtual world, as a transcendental resort that looks like a liquid, flowing and changing paradise, where the bodies seem to melt in the transition toward an energetic form. Things keep their real appearance, just as the human beings, who seem unable to evolve from their shape, to which they are very attached. The digitalised men need more lightness, causing new dysmorphophobias, but they continue to be nostalgic for the pleasures of matter, as confirmed by the use of the virtual world’s icon: the 3D stereoscopic visor, the VR headset, enabling to come and go from a dimension that is alternative, and not definitive.

Jeremy Pellington
Jeremy Pellington creates peculiar videos and installations that investigate on less obvious aspects of human existence, doing extensive researches on the origins and causes beyond appearances and the preconceptions of society. His interest is particularly focussed on the relation between mankind and technologies. In the video “Sleeper Ship” he illustrates a research with many insights on the so-called cryogenic suspension, a trendy topic until the past century but that almost everyone do not consider any more. Proved to be a resounding failure poised between medicine, technology and fraudulent theories, the idea of freezing people to wait for a possible future when we could cure, rejuvenate or make them immortal, beside all the problems about sustainability and possible accidents, throws a sinister light also on the trustworthiness of the actual so-called science, as well as on the actual transhumanist ideologies that elect technology as a new god, or demiurge.

Nina Sumarac
Artist recognised for the research on the relation between individual, society and technological achievements, Nina Sumarac is devoted to visual arts mainly using new media and digital tools, starting from the experience with classic drawing and painting techniques. Interested in artistic creation and in philosophy as well, her artworks deal with the social and human issues in a contemporary scenario characterised by huge changes and imbalances, where the individual is sacrificed to the cause of profit of a technocratic globalism. The work “Find the artist”, that in a way is not the artist’s creation, consists in theory of just the issue of a command to the artificial intelligence algorithm that generated the series of pictures composing the work, but also and above all of the sarcasm in the title itself, with which the artist from one side declares implicitly the authorship of the artwork, but from the other side she seems to reject it as an artist.

Shaharee Vyaas
Observer of the human affairs, Shaharee Vyaas cannot be enclosed in the sole definition of artist (the one who makes,) as his activity is in first place philosophic and meditative, to the point that he preferred to coin the term Cryptomathician to introduce himself. His research, beside being expressed through more explicit literary publications, takes advantage of digital painting to become tangible allegory, more intimately and incisively enjoyable by the perception of the subconscious. Sharing concepts existing in the Dalì’s Surrealism, Vyaas’ artworks promote the metaphysical perception of reality, beside obviating the limits of language in expressing abstract and sublime concepts. Their dense symbolism describes a world from a distant observation point, just apparently detached, but always empathic toward the human condition, resorting to a multiplicity of recognisable elements and to a vibrant appearance suggesting a reality that needs a deep reinterpretation.

Andrzej Wojciechowski
With a broad experience in documentary and artistic-experimental photography and cinematography, Andrzej Wojciechowski creates suggestive works where the human beings and their personality are always in the foreground, sometimes telling stories with a poetic and comforting taste, other times startling with surreal and vivid pictures where the individual and the natural element are put face to face, until they hybridise, superimpose and mix with the artificial things that surround them, the creations of the human civilisation. The series “Hybrid” suggests the interdependency between man and machine, as they depend and exist thanks to the other, considering that men reached the actual status thanks to what they created, and that without these creations they would loose a large part of their capabilities, to the point that the identity of individuals is linked to the machine they operate, starting from the working world and up to comics, sci-fi, games, Internet and virtual reality.




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Escapism - collective art exhibition

Pietro Angelini
Pietro Angelini imparts a free and fresh spirit to the brief and minimalist short film that brings a dual message of insightful ambiguity. Starting from the reference to the everlasting debate on the self-financing of independent cinematographic productions, in respect of which he proves that successful works can be achieved with almost nothing if one starts from a steadfast idea, the video combines also an evident narration as much shattering as incendiary, throwing a spear against the currency that in the Western imagination most fits the role of hegemon, by simply choosing which one to condemn to the stake. But even merely interpreting it as an undefined stereotype of money, the simple act of setting a banknote on fire is a strong message to affirm the supremacy of the idea over materialism.

Max Breakenridge
Interested in the metaphysical aspects of reality beyond the sensorial appearance, Max Breakenridge examines those mechanisms and prime motors that make things move, the wills that create and shape society. Through an oneiric lunar atmosphere, in the video “To the Garden “ he conducts us toward the self-observation, making us feel belonging to an alien otherness, like sons of a communal cosmos, up to cross every threshold, to become a thought, free from any conditioning, and then find again inside ourselves the atavistic memories that take us back to the source of our origins, rediscovering the primeval contact with nature to which we belong, and even earlier, to the energetic and free ocean of possibilities.

Shanna Fliegel
Shanna Fliegel, expert and eclectically devoted to ceramic art, goes beyond the experimentation determining personal interdisciplinary modalities where modern techniques converge in the creation. On the objects obtained through refined methods, she impresses her own imaginary of visionary complexity about societally captivating topics that are open to subjective interpretations. Her expression shines and overlooks the ordinary, intellectual but at the same time hedonistic, being able to represent leading existential topics in a gentle and pleasant way. The aim is to come out from conformisms, from the absurd behaviours of a stifling society, pragmatic enough to eventually annihilate the human beings under the weight of responsibilities for their actions.

Lăcră Grozăvescu
Concerning the relation between the Self and the world, Lăcră Grozăvescu examines the ability of images to activate individual memories that cause a sense of synchronic belonging, analogy of the identity, not to make the individual’s uniqueness trivial, but to prove the appropriateness of human behaviour. Her photographs are places of thought and reflection, memory, meditation, with deeply evocative atmospheres inspired to subjects that are apparently collateral, but of intimate value, telling stories of estranging taste, in search for the disengagement, the silence, and that sometimes seem to tell that we cannot find ourselves again, to the point that we rather prefer to get lost, to go far away where nobody can interfere with our need for contemplation.

Winnie KS Hui
The art expression of Winnie KS Hui is characterised by a serene contemplation of cosmos and the world were we are immersed, in search for the poetry in those elements and the details that witness the transience of events and the essence of things. The lyricism of her artworks comes from a concentration of mind that expresses through the accurate prefiguration of the pictorial gesture, the control of the sign that is wanted to materialise. This attitude is particularly typical in the oriental cultures, where a beautiful handwriting is synonymous with virtue and tranquillity, just like when practicing Tai Chi. Poetry and thoughtfulness of the Self to resist against the repressions carried by a regime that would want to outdo a people such as that of Hong Kong who chose their own way of life.

Veronika Krämer
Interested in studying how the form conveys information and generates sensorial stimuli, Veronika Krämer uses the tension between contrasts and optic effects achieved with geometric repetitions and strong chromatic combinations to create artworks that suggest dynamism, getaway and capture the gaze. The picture split in orderly textures, suggests the interposition of multiple realities, the coexistence of parallel dimensions, of alternatives and new ways to see and read appearances. The optical contrast between sharp areas that are apparently empty and blurry areas seemingly more significant, suggests instead that the apparent reality is not more important than the metaphysics that defines and delimits it. If we observe the whole, we can realise that even the void has nuances.

Ekaterina Kuzmina
Artist with a cultural background in different fields of knowledge, Ekaterina Kuzmina has chosen to merge her expertise with the sensibility arisen from her personal experiences into art expression. By focussing and specialising in oil painting, her subjects have a subtle symbolistic and non-verbal significance, subliminally whispering to the observer’s Self, because they are universally connected to the representation of the states of mind. Together with a pleasant stylistic manner made of well finished details, the artist’s ability to comprehend the human sphere, lends to her artworks a communal attraction for affinity, in other words an empathy for those existential aspects that reflect in the lives of everybody.

Lucas Rebelo
Lucas Rebelo directs his short films with rational empathy, and knows how to tell deep and inspiring emotions, even using a minimalist syntax that is often tacit or distant, but where you can recognise a particular sensitivity in understanding the most essence of the human being, that the framing places in the role of observer, a thinker abstracted from the scene, who contemplates in the search for harmony with the natural environment and the cosmos. As the title of the prolific series suggests, “Amazonian Slowness“, to which the exhibited video belongs, we are referring to slowness as the practice that lets you reach that clarity of mind required to become aware of the hysteria of modernity, of the absurdity of taking part in the rat race, where the mice are unable to get off the wheel.

Ruth & Alexander
Ruth & Alexander is extensively and deeply involved in a research on the ethical questions of society, on the relation between the human being and the profit system, covering also the issues in the management of information, either artificial or physical and energetic. Sensible to the interferences from the system of power in people’s lives, he lingers on investigating the pervasive surveillance of individuals, who are considered productive automatons, robota, without any privacy, as they are treated the same as properties for trade in the jobs market. With the implementation of indefatigable and inhumanly cold devices, the person gets to represses free will and dignity, to the point that the slaves of the past had more soul. Society can offer its material benefits only at the cost of a total annihilation of the spirit.

Ian Kevin Scott
Ian Kevin Scott shows all his expertise in telling a story, both as an author and as an actor. The little pearl entitled “Alchemy”, a tastefully evocative and mesmeric short film, reveals the simple nature of the most primal spirit. The human being suffers when it must undergo an oppressive system ruled by the logic of profit, where apprehension and lack of empathy have become normality, and where few are able to remain themselves, at least in the soul. The one who succeeds, is often put in a corner for not being conform, not driven by competitiveness, but by a little inner passion, maybe naive, but so important because of one’s own. The work combines amusing surreal atmospheres with a character as much idealist as determined in overcoming any obstacle.

Leni Smoragdova
Eclectic multidisciplinary artist, Leni Smoragdova makes the vital energy tangible thanks to an expression that is realist and surrealist at the same time, with a taste poised between drama and absurd, and with a pronounced symbolism. In the photographic series to which the exhibited artwork belongs, the faceless persons represent the depersonalisation of the individual, treated like a commodity, soulless flesh, with a mere economic value, whose naked body emphasises their physical frailty compared to the power of metaphysical forces that move the world, in the form of ideologies, governments, economies, norms and prejudices. The artist investigates the ideal limit so far the individual can tolerate pain, constraints, torment, deprivation of own moral or spiritual integrity, or the consequences of political and economic manoeuvres that manifest through war and other repercussions.

Tom Snelgrove
Together with a refined aesthetics, the artworks of the multidisciplinary artist Tom Snelgrove highlight a mature sociopolitical vision. Dealing with cultural episodes that happened along history and globally, they offer a reasoned framework on social attitudes. Ideologies not always practical, thus contrasting with the fundamental needs of existence, turn out to be hegemonic ideas, proving that social organisation is often an imposture of egocentric minds, that in the end leads to the totalitarian repression of others. Under this analysis, the character is the utter protagonist, whose unexpressed attitude is being everted and materialised in the costume, making the inner evident, transforming semeiological clues into proofs.




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David Detrich - System of Simulacra

The expression of David Detrich starts a debate on the significance that an object, in its materiality or its image, recalls in the memory of the beholder, and when we look at one of his artworks we surely recognise in him the figure of the critical artist, as he takes advantage of the connections, even unconscious, to generate new meanings, deviations from the common sense and the stereotype. To him any representation is never realist, but surrealist and conceptual. The object, the product from the consumerist system, opportunely reduced, decontextualised and finally repurposed, reveals its own essence of mere simulacrum, not devotional but rather altered into indistinct features, thus ineffectual, with the aim of spoiling the credibility of the same system, as it is a system based on simulacra.
As if they were warning totems, Detrich’s artworks reveal the great deception of the image, as already denounced by Magritte but notwithstanding that today it has evolved into a pervasive mass addiction.

But if the simulacrum is a material or visual representation of something, to the extent that we should consider all the art a production of simulacra, the situation is different for the meaning of simulacrum that we can attribute to social life, which is that of picture representing the status symbol and the status quo: it is the object of possession, the trophy and the ransom-reward, the good needed to define and flaunt one’s own social level or to give a meaning to the alienation deriving from the self-immolation on the altar of productivity, a compensation to one’s own sacrifice.

Detrich produces artworks that deal with the pseudo-reality, the socio-economic fable narrated by the materialist system of consumerism, which avails itself of the status symbol to induce an unhappiness that could be soothed only by the induced needs. The artworks with a factitious appearance evoke the frail structure of marketing, which is the foundation for the modern collective imagery and a conformist and uniform existential model, where the individual has just a role as actor reading an already written part.

We can find this personality of disillusionment in the Haute Carture series, that compares the two main “objects” in the consumerist imagination: the automobile and the female fashion, since ever strongholds of the sophistication, as well as antipodes of the stereotypical antagonistic relation male-female and its variance power-beauty, the one needed to get the other and conversely, in a continuous chase for possession and achievement of compulsory standards.
We can find it as well in the series of Art Molecules, that combines instead elements of the anxiety for the appearance pulled from female fashion magazines, where often the woman appears isolated, recluse in her own thinking about how to look to be “successful” or effectual in the same struggle for possession, the same she is trying to escape, but that many times causes big failures, as it is lost at the start cause of an artificiality and a sophistication that nothing have of definitely appealing as much as the naturalness.

In this way, the individuals, in the hard search and chase for the standardised stereotype of the object-good or for matching with the imagery, become themselves simulacra, they become diaphanous and inconsistent images of themselves, nice projections of an in ideal that however often hold nothing, inasmuch all the energies have been spent for the wrapping, for the coating; from this the term vanity originates: emptiness. For this reason we could consider these artworks by Detrich also contemporary vanitas.

In front of this panorama of conformism, Detrich presents himself as a fluid observer, free, prototypical, immune from prejudices and stereotypes, therefore with that ability to spot the Naked King, the system’s fallacy, the house of cards of the hedonistic world, but leaving the others to choose whether to make fun of that world, leave it or make it to crumble, or to continue serving it.

Classically, the simulacrum is linked also to the religious representation of the divine, to the materialisation of a metaphysical concept, of the divinities, and even this significance is perfectly fitting to the contemporary society, as this is dominated by the cult of profit, the one god, all-embracing, irascible and pitiless. The capitalistic consumer and luxury goods are ex voto glorified by the adepts of the cult of commodification, they are modern icons of the acts of saints and blessed of vainglory, of prophets and evangelists of the business.
As in the representation of the divinity, the simulacrum tries to replace the thought itself, causing its fall through crystallisation, in other words by materialising it with the purpose of imposing it as noumenon, which is something that exists absolutely and unequivocally regardless of the phenomenology of our senses, something of which we should not even dare to think that it could be inexistent or just an opinion, something absolute that nobody should doubt of.
In this way the consumerist simulacra become unethical physical instruments, idols of the immorality testable with our senses, of which today even Nietzsche would desire their sunset, because they have replaced any vital desire with the longing for possessing them, dragging mankind into the spiral of dependence on the Thing.

And today we find again the god of materialism pervading and invading fields that since ever are protected by ethics and moral, as it comes to affect self-determination, the individual freedom, and to undermine the bases of life itself. We can ascertain this in the “science” of biology, that today has its apex in the engineering of life, that is the genetic manipulation and rewriting of the DNA. The materialist narration of consumerism depicts the living beings as nothing else than meat puppets, commodifiable, modifiable, improvable, or directly artificially built and tailored, although with the use of instruments that does nothing more than imitating what nature already does, or rather with the sole addition of control, since being able to control means to take possession, to become owner, again and again.

In this context, the Flashcards series is addressed to the conscience of man in an endearing and apparently naive way, representing that narration leading to dramatic ethical implications as if it was speaking to children, surely not because it is suited to an immature audience, but because it mocks the same narration of the materialism which writes suggestive fables to tell to its own eternal infants, made incapable of seeing beyond the comfortable appearance that the system has produced and built around them.

In biology engineering, the simulacrum always acquires the meaning of imitation, the living being is replicated, cloned, with the purpose of creating a product that is more available, more efficient or more productive. The automaton is the eternal Promethean dream of scientism, it is the robota by Čapek, the Frankenstein by Shelley or the superhuman golem that can serve its demiurgic master-creator, he who above all sees in his creature the celebration of his own presumption of superiority, even to the same nature that created the maker, up to claim the status of divinity, given that he can give or take life.

Since its inception the system sees in the human being nothing else than a worker, the robota, reduced to unthinking mechanism which sole need consists in the lubrication with consumer products that it is also contributing to build. Also the artists would not be spared from being treated that way by the system indeed, as in ancient times the artist has always been considered a nameless and subordinate artisan worker. Since the Renaissance this premise started to crack, allowing the birth of the modern artist, independent and free to conceive, to think, to express. Yet today that explosion of self-determination is again under the attack of the materialistic pragmatism, that tries to devalue the independent genius, by pushing a comparison in the technical field with the machines, the artist-robots. Machines equipped with the so-called artificial “intelligence” already exist, and they mimic and even outclass the technical-artistic human skills. But Renaissance has taught, to the few who were able to grasp the lesson, that the true heritage of mankind is not technique, but the intelligent spirit, the thought, the fantasy, the genius, which makes use of technology as an expressive instrument, not as a crutch, and conversely neither allows to be guided by the instrument.

David Detrich hits again the mark, infusing these concepts in the artwork Authentic Simulation, that reaches the core of the question, similarly asked by Hamilton in the last century with his famous collage that started the Pop Art: what makes consumerism and modernity so appealing? Detrich makes use of the most advanced and fashionable technology, the 3D printing, right to open the dialogue with this modernity dominated by compulsive consumption, asking the same question, but again shifting the object of attention and of desire, with his taste for the sarcastic, the caustic, the critique of Dada lineage. The plastic artwork again imitates the imitation, mocks the simulacrum of pleasure, the pralines, the chocolate sweeties, the bonbons with features designed to satisfy a materialist obsession that often is more visual than palatal, or that matches with and satisfies that imagery built in the mind of the masses, supplying lubricating psychic “energy” to continue running the machine of profit. Moreover, the reference to sweets, and chocolate in particular, is not accidental, because the latter is recognised as a palliative backing to the lack of affection, which is caused by the same vanity of materialism and of appearance, so it can drive a person to addiction, to the exasperated consumption, because it soothes but does not satiate.

In this case the pralines, loosing the quality of physical food, become true objects, made with the most representative material of consumerism: plastic, that although of natural and sustainable origin (common leitmotifs aimed to prevent consumers from feeling guilty) makes them the emblem of the simulacrum culture, the worship of the product.
Of the object, confined in its sole superficial component, nothing remains but the epiphany of the narration that reveals its own nature of mental medicine, materialised in a pill of dubious effect: the fable told by the system is needed to convince you to swallow it.



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We Are Joseph Beuys - collective art exhibition

Susana Barbara made us accustomed to an allegorical narration characterised by an essential minimalism, where pictures become essence of concepts as much abstract as fundamental to the comprehension of important archetypes. The video proposed in this occasion, with a visual syntax that is elemental, direct and without frills, as yet in the title declares this attitude by representing a subtle metaphoric abstraction to set up a comparison between the human artistic action, meant as technology attempting to transcend nature, and the animal action, which usually we consider mechanical or determined by instinctual rules. Yet, both the superior thinking of will and the instinct are systems that respond to external stimuli, to the solicitations of the environment, thus parts of a natural unique. The investigating spirit of the divine thought, that transcends the Ego trying to reach the perfection of logical reasoning, reveals to us that the so-called and alleged human being’s superiority is the result of the inability to look ourselves from the outside as actors in the stage of a compound cosmos.

The artist blanche the vidiot, who in reality is a binary entity resulting from the cooperation between Szabina Péter and Kristóf János Bodnár, with the act of uniting they make an operation of molecular breakdown of the reality, in order to analyse it thoroughly. The collision of two forces, as in the crash between particles, can break the nuclear bindings causing a chain reaction that reflects on the surrounding matter, the human sphere in this case, up to the enucleation of the elements of its substance. In the refusal of conventions, they get up to the removal of their own identity, not wishing to be defined, relativising the ego, becoming distracted from the self to comprehend nature, both own and cosmic, in its entirety, feeling part functional to the whole, and whole composed of parts. The contemplation of cosmos, reduced to a conceivable representation, like a bonsai, from being source of meditation about beauty, it necessarily becomes commemoration of the reparation, of the atonement, of the awareness about the load of the contemplation itself and the prevarication that nature bears in order to be understood by the conscience.

Benna Gaean Maris demonstrated many times an authentic interest for the respect of nature, not only with the topics addressed in several artworks, but also and above all with the attitude to parsimony, to the economic responsibility, besides with the personal engagement in promoting a philosophic existence that is as much in harmony with the cosmos as possible. The artist practices a multifaceted art, often made of modest materials, not dissimilar from that of Beuys, which does not flaunt materialistic aestheticisms or technical virtuosities, but starts from basic concepts, from the intellectual substance, from the themes that are fundamental and important to the society and the environment, sometimes expressed also in the literary form. In the making of performances we can easily infer the strong tie with nature, as in “rewilding a plum tree”, which has even been considered an evolution readapted to the contemporaneity of the homologous well known Beuysian social sculpture, just like in other performances promoting the respectful contemplation and the peer confrontation between the human and the natural spheres.

Lamija Halilagic delves in thematics that are atypical for the general thinking, thus very important, such as the critical ability and the human needs, encouraging the interest for the perception of reality that surrounds us, as a first step to promote the responsibility, the human beings’ awareness about their own role in the reality, in the earthly dimension, in the natural sphere. The healthy reactive personality has the purpose to shake the society from a numbness that too often leads to the indifference toward the disasters caused by an egocentric and materialistic lifestyle. The artist proves this engagement also by showing she cares that her art is sustainable, both with the reuse of found materials and considering immaterial disciplines, thus favouring the contents rather than the container, and elaborating minimalist formal interventions that underline the little importance of the aesthetic appearance in comparison to the existential themes. With her symbolical and intimistic expression she can manifest her own soul, yet not making it invasive, but drawing it near the beholder, the humankind sharing that existential common seed.

Yana Kononova, graduated in philosophy, has a personal background in ancestral contexts inspiring the contemplation of life and nature. Her interest is focused on the two fundamental elements in the existentialist philosophic search: the human being and the natural world, as she investigates the relation that the spirit of our intellect has with the earthly material condition, an essential question that unites artists and philosophers since ever, as the environmentalist movement implies profound religious and ethical implications, and it starts from the first existential question: why? Her works are dense of emotional and evocative tension; the portraiture works show a remarkable care for an expressiveness that is silent, tacit, but extremely telling, meaningful, while in the scenic works we see a need for answers, for reassurance, for a calmness made of rarefied, stable, unaggressive atmospheres, for a territory that may evoke or reflect our own image, our own origin. Atmospheres with a subtle expression, which look eloquent to those who can understand them, as they already know that sentiment.

With an ample and determined artistic and teaching activity, Bill Psarras demonstrates he is a proficient proponent of concepts and contents, offering descriptive analyses of his own actions. Showing amazement for the nature of things, in his performances Psarras represents the bond between the human being that relates with the natural environment, raising questions about the reasons of the human actions and bringing the focus back on the primal role that the earth has in supporting our civilisation, that too often we consider avulsed. The artistic action, being born from elevated or abstract feelings, it often needs a verbal reporting, thus, to prove its cognisant intent and purpose, to rationalise the gesture that is necessarily subtle and archetypical, the artist acknowledges the importance of the literary or poetic element, both in the form of title and of descriptive narration around intimate and environmental realities. As it is used in the site-specific action, the artist acts with attentive observation and consideration for the territory, listening to its genius loci to receive its instructions on how to feel it a vital and expressive space, elevating its elements and natural materials as protagonists.

Lucas Rebelo, born in lands tightly linked in the collective imagination to the most common idea of naturalness, confirms our expectations about a nature that is fulfilling, sincere, mother, able to host us and soothe our sadness, to satisfy our questions with answers that are mute but all-inclusive, satiating like an Agape, as much religious as pagan. In his works, spanning between visual, literary and music arts, we find an astonished gaze, a contemplation for the natural, wild element, where the tree and the vegetation instill calmness and solemnity, forcing us to stop and let our beat slow down, bringing it back to the earth’s pace, so that we can figure out, we can shake off those constructs of a world that here becomes distant, alien to the heavenly condition. A cineast intrigued by the means offered by technology, but who still let himself be fascinated by the verdant wildness, he endeavours in submitting the instrument to the purpose of the respect of nature, relegating it to a mere witness of how great is the creation compared to the smallness of the human struggles.

An artist whose strength is that of acknowledging the fragility of the human condition, Lexygius Sanchez Calip collocates his own action interstitially in the folds of the surrounding environment, either natural or artificial, positioning transversally to the weaves of a big cosmic design, of which he intercepts and catalyses the gravitational forces to deflect them toward the beholder. His presence stays discreet, conforming in a chameleonic way, detecting and taking advantage from the tension, both superficial and metaphysical, proving a sensitivity for the thin currents and a union with the unity of the creation. His whole artistic action expresses through minimalist interventions, of minimal environmental impact, with ecological care, that is by respecting the law of natural economics: the best result at the least energy cost. His art is as much subtle as sustainable, lightweight and respectful, willing of leaving discreet existential trails for a humanitarian and social sake, but not being pitiless, not pretending too much or impose on the world or the others, a sign of unconditional respect that can exemplify and teach lessons.

Heir of American Natives’ oral tradition, José D. Trejo-Maya responsibly accepts the duty of becoming witness of the great human presumption of imposing and acting pitiless against nature and even one’s own kind who took teachings and wisdom from nature, respecting and observing it, manoeuvring with balance and in harmony, with simplicity and reasoning. As a depositary of shamanic traditions that with the sole divine inspiration were able to investigate and own the cosmic depths and the spirit that animates things, Trejo-Maya lets the lyrical rapture speak, allowing the mind to open itself to poetry, to a vision non-conformed to the mundane decrees, going into contact with the immortal soul of the human being, retracing one’s own ancestral origins, listening to one’s own heart, which is the heart of the vital essence, not the social compromise that permits us to live but what we want to live for. Trejo-Maya gives us confirmation and reassures us, that the spark never gets extinguished, it survives even in the void and facing any attack, thanks to communication.

Elena Waclawiczek makes use of the body to interact with the space in an extemporaneous way, leaving her own instinct to feel the surrounding environment, as in the search for an ecstatic rapture to open on new cognitive levels and transcendence, turning from actor to acting-body, which becomes potential, relative, adaptable, malleable, matter-word. The artist has an exploratory, cognitive intent, becoming poetic and living allegory in the search for knowledge, for enlightenment, often emerging from the darkness of void. The contact is the leading means with which this exploration is carried out, sometimes delicate and eked out, other times impressive and direct like in the video-performance “Impact”, where the contact with the crude and real matter of nature becomes clear message of empathy with the real reality, unsweetened, like Beuys utilised raw materials, heavy and uncomfortable, often bulking, to consecrate their importance. The given example suggests to win over the unnecessary fear of getting dirt, of becoming contaminated by earth, because the human beings like everything animating this world originate from the earth and are made of the same substance.


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Art Of Freedom - collective art exhibition

Gifted with a profound culture, strengthened by an ethical and philosophic research developed in his own life, Mladen Bundalo ranges in the study and interpretation of human society from different aspects. With the lucidity suitable to an ethologist, but combined with the affectionate empathy of the peer, he deals with the analysis of human events of a bipolar society, from the pragmatic and anthropological point of view and the subtle and symbolic as well, bringing his narrative contribute with metaphors that can make to internalise an intimate and abstract awareness in the observer.
Having lived in first person, Bundalo deals in particular with the phenomenon of migration, that seen in its complexity has origins and implications of collective macro-economic nature, but it can be atomised in the conditions and existential needs of the element-individuals, who respond to the fundamental cosmic rules of attraction and repulsion, thus forming a collective Brownian macro-movement. The Hyper-migration is not a contemporary only phenomenon, but it is being examined by the artist from a way older historic and anthropological point of view, dating back to the proto-civilisations in the Indo-European settings, configuring the necessity of understanding the caused that push people toward migration, and then reorganise a horizontally developed egalitarian society, as a criticism to the sociopathic exploitation driven by the oligarchic politics founded on vertical and pyramidal hierarchy.

Vanessa Chyi’s message is as much important and fundamental as evident is the way to express it: to set free the person from the small and big sufferings that tamper the individual or hinder one’s serene existence. The representation of her own body and the joy she infuses with a frank and direct gaze to the observer are the medium and the technique of an art with a didactic virtue, because it teaches, witnessing her own experience and giving the example to imitate using her own person.
The concealment of the body drove the humankind toward a negation of its nature, hiding everything that is emotional and true below endless blankets of mystification, prejudice, pride and pretensions. Cloaking the naked body, the dress, the fig leave that today everybody wear, is archetypical expression of refusal, of others or of oneself, of segregation or hostility, that transforms itself in attire, then in uniform and later in armour, bunker where destructive forces that undermine peace are harbouring.
Chyi perfected her artistic skills starting as a child and today she can offer these paintings that do not end up in just representing the gracious epidermal surface, but above all expresses one of the key concepts to criticise the (un)human society and to bring it back to love and harmony.

Interdisciplinary and eclectic artist, Adán De La Garza stands out for that healthy ambition of who is moved by the irrepressible spark of freedom.
His expression, meeting the tradition of conceptual art, goes to the semiological heart of the topic, freeing itself of aesthetic frills.
Many of his artworks deal with the spirit of rebellion, extrapolating the most intimate and primordial essence, but also analysing its fallacies. De La Garza is concerned for how the many forms of dissent could go on complying with to recognisable standards, conforming to the correctness of debate, and thus being moulded on the shape of the homogenising oppression that they would like to oppose, hence flowing into a protest that is bridled, castrated, not completely free, when instead it should be unpredictable, indefinable and explosive.
The visual and metaphoric syntax of his artworks does not look too inscrutable and hieratic, but it is kept comprehensible even to the casual person and it is often jovial and cheering up.

DUNE, despite practicing activities that are akin to different art disciplines, - from photography, to graphics, to lyric and literature, beside philosophy, - does not like to be defined an artist, considering that belittling of a more ample freedom of expression, and above all of thought, which is the fundamental seed of creation. The creation of DUNE’s picture relies on chance, not posing technical goals or professional ambitions whatsoever, but rather responding to expressive urgencies due to the need to communicate a sensational fact, that is - etymologically speaking - monstrous, something that shakes the soul and makes us exclaim, urges us to make the others know. The rarefied production of the artist is conditioned by the subsistence of those unique contingent moments, hard to catch because of metaphysical nature, as messages of spiritist or prophetic kind channelled from the Akashic sphere from where everything comes from, be whether tangible or intangible. DUNE’s “psycho-photographic” artworks are nebulous entities, unknowable because free from any restriction or definition, shadows of an energy that, despite being ignored from the soul trapped inside the sensorial illusion, is real and testable.

Paulo Fajardo, devoting himself to cinematography with spirit of research, made us familiar with his sensitivity in choosing, deeply understand and develop the subject of his works, where we can definitely perceive a personality. His expression, both stylistic and narrative, characterise his works with a lively empathy for the human dimension, in the sign of a serenity that someone can reach living in harmony with the nature and the cosmos. Successfully identifying the core of the worldly journeys, Fajardo build evocative narrations of placid rhythm that offer a satisfying softening to the existential uncertainties, lightening their weight and relieving the spirit of the observer.
The video “Ephemeral” incarnates this sensation of liberation, as much in the idyll of nature as in the subject of child lightheartedness and imagination, combined to a pertinent lyrical comment, beside the extemporaneousness and immediacy of the shooting done without the use of a specialised equipment, that is catching the moment of serendipitous inspiration.

Yolanda García Morales has an innate hermeneutical ability and a discerned philosophical culture that permit her to transform the constructive forces of the spirit and will into a continuous message of prophetic inspiration, the eternal prophecy that must be told everyday to the human being’s Dasein, so that to avoid that it may loose the gift of freedom, or it may become slave of its own stillness.
Philosophy is a discipline that usually is linked to its male proponents, but precious sources of wisdom originate from female protagonists of any epoch in human civilisation, perhaps kept in the shadow by their male counterpart because of envy for their indomitable and disruptive personality, considering them far too strong, daring or revolutionary. García combines this determination to a mathematically exact reason, and succeed in illustrating the power and the potentialities of conscience. The multi-awarded video artwork “MANJÚN” is a multidisciplinary concert of artists joined by the same desire and guided by the profound and salient words of the director: thought, voice, music, image, matter and body guide the public through a journey of knowledge and awakening.

Shouichi Iwamoto does what he likes to do: since he was a kid his passion for music characterised his research path. Today he can gift us deep emotions of ancestral communion with the cosmos, which is made itself of vibrations. Thanks to the atmospheres of the harmonious genius loci that is typical of his land, Iwamoto amplifies the love for nature and its primordial essence expressed by the vibration and sound, which inner resounding makes the space and the body immersed in it vibrate.
An artist who prefers the emotive conciseness to the verbose complication, lets the instrument’s vibrant sound talk, so much ancestral as the percussion. The sound reflects the perception of the cosmic vibration, the devotion to love that pervades all the creation. And the temple where to offer this prayer can be anywhere, it is the cosmos itself, the planet, and also the solid rock is expression of it.

Jennifer Lange is a visual artist who manoeuvres with breeziness in the production field, but above all she is notable for a multifaceted fantasy that ranges without limits in the collective imaginary, to which she brings always new horizons flowing from her imagination. She skillfully dedicates herself both to the practice of traditional techniques and of digital graphics as well, but never falling in the virtuosity of technicality, in the standardised or prepackaged special effect, that is to say using the possibilities of the instrument in an essential and indiscernible way, preserving the full control on the final outcome, that is to the sole purpose of materialising the simulacrum of the picture that already existed in the mind.
Having studied as an autodidact, with practice and experience never mediated by the homologation of disciplines, Lange reveals a real passion for the expression of the thought running rampant, that push to share with others the enthusiasm of ranging through the conceivable.

A multifaceted and interdisciplinary artist, Antje Lindner approaches to matter and imagine with the purpose of use them as a narrative substance, of transforming and moulding them into philosophical or conceptual manifestations. Lindner succeeds in freeing from the things those subtle metaphysical and semeiotical implications of existence, reporting them to the observer with simple manipulations, adding the minimal artistic feat that transforms the object into subject, into the idea, with a moderately Zen minimalism.
Her attention is particularly aiming to the relation between the Self and the Other-from-Self, that are man and environment, whether natural or artificial or social, but with a particular devotion to the ecologist feeling, to the interdependence between human existence and nature, as our lives depend on it.
In her artworks we can often find the denounce of the sense of estrangement or segregation, indications for the escape toward truth, the observation of Self in the search of the meaning of life, and the mitigation of the antagonism between opposites, or the absolute good and evil, to guide the dualist man of western societies toward a better awareness of the cosmos and their own spiritual meaning, favouring a meditation inspired to the principles of the oriental philosophies.

The pictorial art of Manuela Mordhorst is a materialisation of the transcendental dimension, and starting from the unexpressed seed of intimism she manifests her own research on the meaning of worldly things and of life. With this purpose she creates materic and informal artworks that reveal the states of the spirit and of thought, the vibration of the energy that unites the Being to the Cosmos, hardly explainable in words, but also, as in this case, symbolically totemic artworks where the indefinable essence of the soul combines to the absolutely perfect and hieratic form of the existence: the circle, primordial condition of the I Am that from a dimensionless point structures itself and grows aggregating particles dispersed in the cosmic ether, abiding to the law of attraction, that is love. An atomic and elemental nature that, as for the different fundamental classic substances (Water / movement, Fire / energy, Earth / matter and Air / spirit), grows like a crystal in infinite combinations and in a free way, only apparently casual, because corresponding to the law of reciprocal harmonious affinity.
The use of pigments autonomously made from natural materials enriches the personal research of a life in equilibrium with the universe.

Compellingly using an objective figuration immune from aestheticisms, in order to evoke the causal in the casual, the endeavour of the artist and curator Yu Ching Tseng is that of investigating with rationality and argumentation the inner and manifest facets of the individuals’ homogenisation and the society’s dehumanisation. The field of action where this analysis is done is that of the public image, the objective appearance, as an indisputable semiotic evidence of the existential condition lived on the subject’s body, of testimony of human actions and reaction. The investigating eye is instead the inner one of the artistic sensitivity. The contrast between humanity and artifice causes scares and marks, often invisible because unspeakable, but that have an echo reflected as much in behaviours and expressions as in the trails left by the human action.
Tseng uses a minimalist visual syntax with an immediate and incisive outcome, like in the overwhelming video “The Wall”, where the sentiment of freedom results irrepressible, uncontrollable, even facing the impossible, giving an example to follow, offering an urgent and obstinate impulse to react even in front of the apparent futility of the individual’s action, which however reiterates the example to the next one, reawakening the dozing collective self-determination.

Claire Walka utilises the video-photographic medium substantially to give shape and an all-encompassing sense to her fundamental interest: to communicate, to recount stories, whether reported in a documentary way or as the result of her own investigation beyond the appearance, in both cases with a particular attention in isolating the details, apparently mute but conceptually dense, in their repetition and in their transformation into loquacious front-row actors. Thanks to this ability, Walka succeeds in giving to her narrations, be visual or textual, an evocative power that reveals the reason behind a descriptivism that is only apparently pragmatic.
In her artworks, the natural element, both environmental and human, acquires an inalienable value, even when it is omitted. In the videos “Débris” and “Rauschen” we find destruction and regeneration counterposed. In the former we feel a mesmeric gratification looking to the horrible and deafening demolition of the urban greyness, of those boxes for humans, as much rational as inhuman, apparently durable but destined to a planned obsolescence, dismembered by machines, that like animals stage the reappropriation enacted by nature. In the latter we can breathe the regenerating atmosphere that nature offers eternally and unconditionally with its variable invariability and its caressing murmur, where the anthropic elements appear alien, totemic, like empty and skeletal towers of Babel.


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Zach Koch - Incognito Truth

Zach Koch’s expression, strong of his excellent mastery control in the painting technique and his deep admiration for the great classics, evolves with decisive and big steps towards the search for more freedom from technical constraints and cultural premises, expanding with enthusiasm thanks to the digital medium, becoming testimony of the undeniably intrinsic potentiality that the malleable meta-substance of electronic matter offers to the expression of thought.

Koch identifies and focuses repeatedly on meaningful subjects from the metaphoric and allegoric manifestation encrypted in mass-media culture, making to emerge, from the so variegated contemporary imaginary, all those ubiquitous and transversal elements that are fundamental and eternal, that is by defining a common thread of the modern attitude that is anyway ascribable to every epoch: manifestation of Self and identity, pragmatism and consumerism, techno-addiction, nature, sexuality and sentiment, gender and sense of belonging, symbolism and existential meaning; aspects that may have an ambiguous valence, either positive or negative, as they are expression of a cyclothymic society of incertitude, lost in the fogs of panegyrics aimed to the mystification of the most simple truths, which possibly everyone may discover, if capable to mentally see that “the king is naked”; but also the queen, the retinue and above all ourselves, the people, or anyone who feels sovereign.

To the pre-IT generations, the visual syntax of the electronic era may seem a cryptical language, fitted with neo-archetypes that are comprehensible only by the young blood, and in this sense, we should better care about a more universal pre/post-divide than of the digital-divide. But in Koch’s artworks we find elements of continuity, of trans-generational connection, keys that are both modern and classic, which can work as access bridges between different epochs – as it is already happening in the video-ludic and manga culture that draws with both hands from classicism and mythology –, combining themselves between revolution and memory permanence, in order to fix reference and comparison points, uniting people in an all-embracing celebration, achieving the dream of total inclusivity of every individual in everybody’s paradise, in the total nirvana, in the akashic memory of the whole.

Since the dawn of the video-game and computer culture, a new imaginary made of fantasy and pixels was born, the protagonists of the modern fables have digital souls, they are electronic pulses producing bidimensional shapes and bodies, images, like spectres of a new cognition of knowledge, of the experienceable visuals. Although defined, they are bodies that can change at the speed of thought, and often they transform themselves; the shape-shifting is the characteristic that perhaps unites most of those simulacra: changes sometimes subtle, like a single pixel, but determinant, or macroscopic like the exaggerated and pictographic expressions animating the visages, or those that come to super-deform morphology and dimensions of the entire virtual subject.
Digital art, today, could be seen as the apotheosis and the achievement of conceptual art, and fluid representation of the metaphysics as well, the subtle dimension beyond the physical tangibility, the psychic sphere, where the thought is creator of shape and substance of all things, which are nothing but ethereal ideas, but this way they become visible, like holograms of light crystallised in a spectre, a simulacrum, appearance and proof of their existence, although intangible, or tangible only through interfaces between physics and metaphysics.In the digital world all converges and the idea wins, with always more chances to enjoy art also remotely, 3D printing and 2D reproduction, everything runs on a wire and flows inside the wire.

The power of attraction of contemporary digital iconography is surely strong in digital-native generations, but it is even stronger above all in the directly preceding one, which saw the birth of the information-technology and digital phenomenon, as for example even Andy Warhol was interested in the electronic device since last century’s 80s, despite at that time it offered barely embryonic capabilities compared to now.

Koch bestows much importance to the elemental sign of the digital shape and substance, that is the pixel, the same matter of the electronic representation of the picture. He recognises a sort of reverential fascination to this particle, searching for the best way to highlight its representational potentialities, besides trying to take advantage also of its limitations and alterations to make the beholder conscious of its all-encompassing power, likely to expose its faked essence, that is groundlessness, of the electronic matter.
The act of making the pixels’ small blocks’ expressive entity visible, becomes a techno-romanticism, a neo-nostalgia for times that are all too modern and actual, as since the very beginning in the digital culture it took shape this interest for the beloved and unforgettable pixel, which today may seem at least apparently unimportant, as technology flies at a superhuman pace.

This epoch characterised by the rapid technological evolution, where speed and impermanence dominate, offers both advantages and challenges, but for Zach Koch going from the dilated times of oil painting to the immediacy of the digital medium becomes necessary to confront with and represent a frenzied evolution also at a cultural level, which produces more than we could ever consume. Technology runs faster than what people may understand of its consequences or opportunities, as Douglas Coupland defined it an Accelerated Culture. Everything is fleeting and ethereal, limiting to the continuous here and now, but oppositely to the cognition of decay that gave birth to Romanticism, today everything persists, immortalised in the eternal computer file, as nothing deteriorates because duplicable endlessly, without the burden of restoration, but simply clicking a download button.

So, Koch compares and extends our own everlasting and nostalgic interest for the great classics from the past to the actual post-digital iconographic mythology, encouraging us to preserve memory of all the moments we live, that even if virtually represent the conceptual nucleus of the intellectual cosmos, and that otherwise – quoting the as much mythologic moment of the artificial replicant in the cult-movie Blade Runner –, “will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”


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DEUS EX TERRA - collective art exhibition

Carlos A. Bracho
Bracho’s photographic artworks reveal such never soothed interest for the primordial Self, that inalienable call for the nature, which we all feel, sometimes unconsciously, because founding genesis hidden in the core of the human spirit. The pictures, as much real as imaginary, portray a thinking and divine being, sometimes mystic, spectator transiting between the self-determination and the mimesis with the nature, immersed into an environment apparently wild, and yet familiar and comfortable, or before lost ruins of a society devoted to materialism, thus destined to the decay like the matter itself. This feeling, by now well rooted since Renaissance and then in the post-industrial era yet contemporary to every culture since ancient times, represents that perennial philosophical counterbalance that perhaps can still save us from the disasters of a too rushing progress.

Christine Chin
Christine Chin walks the most contemporary art scene that investigates the potentialities of avant-garde technologies and sciences. Even keeping a solid practicality, with visionary curiosity and genius she looks to the future mankind, but never loosing that grain of subtle sarcasm toward today’s mankind, with its flaws and fallacies. She advances technological or attitudinal solutions that are socially evolved, and yet in harmony with nature, and complying to the primal needs of the living being who firstly is aware of himself and of the environment, and sometimes raising questions on the actual scientific achievements. The formal simplicity and the visual cleanliness evoke in the observer a sense of equilibrium and bestow harmony between the subjects and their own earthly dimension.

ebeck
In ebeck’s artworks you can perceive a natural empathy with the environment, both natural and metaphysical, and a consolidated experience in probing the sidereal expanses of the external then the internal cosmos, that is the universal and microcosm’s environmental reality existing in each and every creature that inhabits it. Ebeck successfully found an expressive manner that is transferring his admiration to the observer, his cognizance of mechanisms and connections that are otherwise indescribable, which put into contact the whole with the parts, into a one field, interconnected, holographic, and yet particulate, in constant motion. The pictorial space is characterised by a perfect equilibrium, never vacuous and never packed, populated by elements that are immutable but transitory, that immediately evoke the hyperborean vision of an intelligence capable of coexisting in sync with Mother Nature.

Marcela Jardón
Thanks to the sensibility acquired practising interdisciplinary arts, Jardón succeeds in restoring the deep communion between the human being and the cosmos, finding the key, the link that was lost with centuries of technocratic alienation. In her artworks the environmental element and the natural matter are often combined to the human condition and its subconscious sphere, in a symbiosis/dichotomy that represents both the solution and the cause of human struggles. The artist promotes a spiritually enlightened knowledge, a serendipitous attitude that does not need peer-reviews, because interior and ingeniously intuitive, a genuine and uncontaminated logic that does not need explanations inasmuch unique and incontrovertible.

Michel Leclercq
As if overpassing his excellent hyperrealist technique, Leclercq depersonalises the naked body by clamping it in tight framings, apparently to make it a universal territory, an ideal, a supreme and archaic feminine idol like the Mother Goddess, the Nature, the Earth. The same range of colours recalls the natural environment, while the bond between the human skin and the foliage, despite a refined and modern look, is the evident call to the primigenial and wild human condition, as well as an exhortation to live a captivating and sensual nature, an all-embracing chant in favour of a life in symbiosis with the environment, a return to an ecological sync, expressed also in the accurate use of artisan materials, beside of the interest in the great master of classicism. Thanks to the setting and the chromatisms, the eroticism is spontaneous and pure, not screaming or frenzied, making it even more genuine, more human and accessible.

Abramo ‘Tepes’ Montini
Beyond the artistic expression, the passion of Tepes for the environment is mainly personal and applied to real life, in the personal choices and attitudes, among which the initiatives promoting an art in favour of nature, which affirm his engagements. The almost monothematic subject in his more recent artworks is based on the feminine universe, on the female as a powerful and disquieting mythological being gifted of the ability to pro-create, archaically considered magical, a creature as much powerful and disquieting as fragile and desirable, depositary of the secrets of nature and of a knowledge designated to the preservation of life. His research of an equilibrium between the human being and the cosmos starts from the dissolution of exclusion, of oppression and violence, favouring the defence of self-determination and freedom of expression, essential requirements for a civilisation in harmony with the environment and to feel the sentiment of affection and universal respect. The condition of disharmony pervading the human world is represented with empty spaces or sidereal darknesses, where idealised figures and subjects symbolise the immortal conceptual model.

Ana Baer & Heike Salzer
Ana Baer e Heike Salzer aim the realisation of collaborative works of video-dance where they share a real and real passion for uncontaminated and unexplored wild territories of the planet Earth. Having a great experience in the fields of choreography and art, they use a comprehensible and frank language that through the performing protagonists narrates about the sentiment of admiration and gratitude for our own cradle of life. The presence of an idealised human being who is interacting with the context of the landscape, from which he is only apparently detached for his quality of exuberant creature, proclaims the will of a meeting point, of a fusion between the divine and earthly dimensions, as if it was for erasing the curse and to invert the terms of the Daphne’s myth: not escaping from Nature, but loving and living in it as human beings.

Orsolya Bálint
The video “Andra’s World” is part of the wide photographic and video-dance project “ReConnect” that Orsolya Bálint is developing with great taste for aesthetics and remarkable skill. The project reviews in a modern and amusing key the great classic art, often including the comparison between a more natural world of the past and the modernity afflicted by symptomatic fallacies. In this video, Andra, the protagonist dancer, is being immersed in the renown painting by Andrew Wyeth, to replace Christina, bringing life to her. The dance evokes lyricism and longing, a desire of taking off to unite with the natural landscape, but the action is like prevented by a disturbing element that holds the body on the floor: the idyllic scene is devalued by the high-voltage lines, lacking in the original painting, which invisible radiations interfere with the motion.

Susana Barbará
The interdisciplinary artist Susana Barbará utilise the video, her choice discipline, to realise the allegoric narration “Al Paraíso” (To Paradise). The self-evident subject is the return to the primordial origin, hypothesis where an Eve takes his steps back, inverting the events’ course, the fall after eating the fruit of knowledge, that is the presumption to transcend over the nature, followed by an Adam. This Paradise embodies the unknown from the future, abandoning oneself to nature by refusing any pretence to know its mechanisms and manipulating or subjugating it, trusting and accepting what it has granted us. Transferring this association to technology, this is no more necessary than the knowledge of the inner self to live in nature. In this sense we can see the denial of civilization in the narrative elements: before crossing the threshold, Eva drops the dress, that is the first technological expedient with which to cover the body and overcome the intolerable Self and to reach lands that were otherwise too cold, while Adam abandons the dogs, that is the exploitation, the subjugation and the manipulation of other lifeforms, the herding, the hunting, the aggression, the war.

Piers Broadfoot
Piers Broadfoot has skilfully written, produced and interpreted “Urbancholia”, a short film with hyperborean atmospheres that has the intenseness and the quality of a large production. Broadfoot shines for the high artistic level of his works. His films are impeccable, absorbing, evocative and fascinating. The brief portray of the protagonist’s life is sufficient to pull out and make viewers live those empty spaces, those estranging absences of the urban man, that many people will recognise because they already lived in their own. The artificial life of the modern world can even return satisfactions to the body and ego, but makes the soul fragile. The spirit always looks for the absolute and the existence’s principle, dreaming the nature.

Camille Crampsey
Camille Crampsey in the video “Trees shiver” offers an elegiac ode to the beauty of nature, that can be grasped by those who have the sensibility to catch the great and fractal complexity of the universe, that exists in all its forms and even in the smallest and apparently amorphous expression. Impressed by the enormousness of the trees, highest exponents of the green kingdom, compares their multiple morphological appearances to barely verbal definitions, thus human, as if she was searching for a connection, a point of communion between the two world, like a primal process of comprehending and giving a name to the world. Crampsey, that made of this empathy a lifestyle, composes this thanksgiving with a formal and elegant visual syntax, and draws from the poem by Henri Michaux, author also of inspiring paintings evoking magical connections with the cosmos.

Mirjam Dahl Pedersen
Mirjam Dahl Pedersen skilfully directs the poetic short film “Nemophelia” that with a persuasive rhythm and a mystic atmosphere captures the viewer like a fantastic tale. The scene is placid but impended by an urgency, the one that the modern man subconsciously feels facing an uncontaminated and eternal nature, considering it unreachable, feeling the urge to free oneself from the load of a trite untruth, to receive in exchange a truth that became tangible. The portmanteau of the title evokes transience and passing, suggesting the idea of letting die the actual own false condition, own fake, to enter a new dimension of well-being, in peace with the nature, caressed by the wind and fortune, breathing truth and touching the reality.

Paulo Fajardo
Written and directed by Paulo Fajardo, the short film “Pastor de Sonhos” (Shepherd of Dreams) from one side sharply reports the images of a landscape of moving beauty, precluded to the largest part of the urban masses, and from the other it tells the profound philosophic considerations of who lives this landscape. The hardness of life in the mountains results insignificant compared to the benefits it offers: the spiritual satisfaction facing the infinite, the clarity of a mind free from chaos, the freedom. Here life is simple and needs are reduced to the minimum, while time abounds, favouring the contemplation, the meditation, the comprehension of those celestial mechanisms that only a clean mind can delve; this is the meaning of a life in harmony with the cosmos: to accept one’s own condition praising the gift of imagination.

Francisco García
Francisco García make use of the media that today more than ever characterise the modern global cultural scene born with the mass distribution of electronics: audio and video, pictures and music; his expressive language is determinately coherent to the all-embracing culture of the image, the visual tale, the rhythm, the music video, immediate and enjoyable, without prolixity. In this way the video “Genesis” tells a story in a feasible futurity setting, a future at the reach of a hand but with a primordial taste, a demonstration of a sensibility more natural than synthetic, where the human being is facing the unavoidable nature, of his own and of the environment, that exuberantly pulse again, making any attempt of dominating or studying it through technology vain, leaving the being and the cosmos alone one facing the other.

Finn Harvor
With an ample culture and a recognised competence in social, anthropic and natural fields, the writer, director and interdisciplinary artist Finn Harvor shows an immense media library centred on the relationship between man and nature that covers uncountable ecological, social and cultural topics. In the extemporary video-reportage “Greening Korea” he presents his own direct and frank analysis on what we could do and from which model we could get inspiration in the search for an existence that on the one hand refuses to threaten the natural world and on the other hand can not deny our attitudes of evolved and complex beings, for which we inevitably cause changes to the environment, and after all like any animal species does although in different extents.

Dee Hood
Professor Emerita and multi-awarded artist, Dee Hood in her video and paint artworks deals with topics that extend from the intimism to the social sphere, from the ethical to the metaphysical, with an expressionist style hinging between figurative realism and abstractionism. The subject is the relationship between the human being and the surrounding environment, both anthropic and natural, and sometimes she proposes direct answers to the questions arising in the analysis of their interaction. In the video “Circumference” a certain feeling of uncertainty is revealed instead, like inadequacy when facing the big doubts and alarming scenarios broadcast by environmental propaganda, and it seems to raise a plea to the insensible who prefers not to hear the globe’s laments, finding a solution to the fears in the clarity of conceiving the reality of the present, in the hic et nunc.

Simone Hooymans
Interested in the natural environment and fauna, in particular in the fragile equilibrium and the species endangered by the anthropic effects in north territories, Simone Hooymans composes, with a hand and digital hybrid technique, fascinating animations of natural worlds, belonging to a familiar yet fantastic ecosystem, magical, populated by a variety of organisms that seem to come out from the Voynich manuscript, that turns out to be just the earthly dimension of a larger universe enclosing it, in a harmonious and poetic oneness. This connection between natural world and cosmic deeps is evokes in a hypnotic and mystic way, like an enlightenment reaching the prisoner in the Plato’s cave, favouring a lucid meditation that draws near the sublime and the cognition of cosmic belonging.

Yuan Kong
Kong, videoartist, choreographer and performer, show up to the community’s attention as a peer, without presumption, his works are questions he poses to himself and addresses to others politely, questions concerning our existence, on what it means what we do, creating minimalist videos, essential, sometimes even amusing, but that basically open doors in the observer, as said questions as much essential, to which we therefore feel the need to give an answer. In the video “One Dance” Kong directs a choreography for the most essential of the questions: who are we. We know we were born from the earth, of having received the gift of a body that will return to the earth; still there is the astonishment of Ego contemplating nature.

Boris Marinin
Boris Marinin starts from the appearance of things to extrapolate metaphysical realities that are independent from preconceptions, and the knowledge recognised as such, in other words he does find truths inscribed in reason without the conditionings dictated by the system. In the work “Greenhouse” he shows involvement and profound capacity for philosophical analysis in environmental issues, which are too often screens to protect certain economic policies, the unconscious manifestations of an indefatigable anthropocentrism and egotism. The fulcrum of the problem is deduced from the unconscious, the inner unknown, the seed upon which an inexplicable and unknowable behavioural knot is stratified, proteiform and fluid, black as petroleum, which is a recognised metaphor of human greed, of thoughtless profit in detriment of the environment, of depletion of the Earth, of the will to rage and conquer everything, which must be shown before sublimating.

Juliette McCawley
An internationally recognised expert filmmaker, Juliette McCawley is personally attracted by the expressions of the many cultures, both in urban substrates and in ethnic and tribal contexts: through the cinematic and photographic lens she captures both the intimacy of the being immersed in a modern context and the manifestations of the traditional and archaic culture. In the short film “Cathedral”, using a minimalist syntax and an evocative atmosphere, she makes a parallelism between the central nave of an ancient French cathedral and the one formed by the intertwining of the canes of a bamboo forest that wraps an earthy street. The metaphorical meaning is evident, suggesting to sublimate certain medieval fears that have entrenched humanity within walls, within courts of privileged people who have forgotten the county, by leaving the door towards the light, to let us enlighten by the sunny nature, to follow that path. Nature is already our kingdom, our home, and can embrace and protect us.

D.K. Odessa & Tara Mullins
Both operating in the green South Carolina, D.K. Odessa, a renowned multifaceted director and artist, and Tara Zaffuto Mullins, director of the State Dance Program, direct this short but cleverly intense choreography. The evocative message is unmistakably characterised by the title, the music, the movements and the context: fascination and amazement for the nature, desire to be apt for soaring flights like a seagull in the wind and to wander and admire the wild beauty of Earth, conceive it in its wholeness by contemplating it from above with the sight feeling to be part of it, to embrace it. The condition of the human being, bound to the ground and with limited possibilities to travel great distances, is symbolically represented by the bench, and perhaps it is the cause of the narrow abilities to see the world from above even in a broad sense; therefore science, meant as the desire to understand, is the instrument with which we can make our conscience fly.

Ruchita
A multidisciplinary artist of great talent and marked analytical skills, Ruchita pursues a socio-anthropological investigation that examines the contrasts and the boundaries between the existential condition of the contemporary human being and the natural context, thanks also to the same extremes that characterise the country where she lives, Brazil. The performance “State of stable disequilibrium” shows a feminine silhouette that keeps the balance on a single foot, as an allegorical symbol of mankind in the act of surpassing itself, of demonstrating its ability to go beyond its nature. With a taste from the most classic mimic tradition, that artists like the great Lindsay Kemp gave to humanity, Ruchita with an essential scenography manages to tell a story, the history of human civilisation, made of defeats and hopes.

José Paulo Santos
José Paulo Santos made this documentary perfectly embodying the spirit that motivated the realisation of the exhibition, the ideal combination of technology and nature. The protagonists are real and intellectually rich people who show us and demonstrate how to live in harmony with nature. A sincere demonstration is the best story that can instruct the mankind; not metaphor, not hyperbole, but just a model, that Santos scrupulously organises and composes in a clear and ascending narrative fabric: who, what, how, why, the reasons are enucleated. Work and know-how for one’s own sustenance are the technology, the peasant tools are its expression; the knowledge of herbs and what nature can offer us spontaneously for our well-being is science. The people in contact with nature, contrary to certain fop’s stereotypes, are far more capable of philosophical reasoning and spiritual elevation than those who are freaked out by the troubles of the so-called progress, from which they expect answers.

Terry Silvester
Terry Silvester expresses himself through video narration, with which he can make to coexist the dimensions of the real and of the absurd, that are the usual and the never seen, in a meta-realism with a strong emotional tension, unsettling and suggestive. In his works the real dimension is represented by a natural, ordinary environment, which is the usual, while the absurd consists in the alien element of human figures that disturb its balance. These figures are fragile, cyclothymic, indeterminate or pathetically grotesque in their indeterminate actions, actions that when reset into peculiar contexts may seem even coherent, but show up their insignificant smallness and disutility when displaced in the frank nature, facing the genius loci, the spirit of Earth.

René Smaal
René Smaal loves to layer and manipulate meanings, breaking up the banal and playing with the multiplicity of its fragments; by resorting to the absurd of the surreal expression, he manages to show that there is nothing more surreal than the appearance of reality. In the video “Re/cycle” he evidently mentions the paintings with inconsistent trees of the most famous of the surrealists, the namesake René Magritte, emphasising that, as in Surrealism, rational interpretations are vain; but we can look for an irrational interpretation to let rise an environmentalist thinking in the observer’s mind: re-cycle – bi-cycle, trees – paper, employee at late – placid nature, rediscovered bi-cycle – disappearing bi-cycle, delay – trees are time-space warps > splitting; here are the causes, effects and lack of solutions to the econo-ecological problem.

Igal Stulbach
Igal Stulbach decides to use a minimalist expressive language to set the fundamental and iconic theatricality of the human being’s technological gesture that stands out and imposes itself on nature. This gesture, to some extent alien to the environment, in this case is the art, which is the highest form of human expression. The art represented in the video “Sign” clearly evokes the expression of the great modern artists such as Pollock or Appel who used the sign as a fingerprint of their own Ego, but also the geometries of Mondrian. This art archetype is superimposed on the natural element par excellence: water, the source of life, characterised by fluidity, the ability to change and adapt. So the human being must be: fluid, able to conform to the environment, not vice versa, to let the two worlds coexist in harmony.

Kat Vivaldi
Recently graduated in Visual Arts, Kat Vivaldi shows multidisciplinary attitudes and thanks to her expression of experimental nature she creates works in which she investigates the possible applications of new technologies and new media, yet never limiting to technicality, but pursuing subject and concept. In the experimental video “I” the skin surface of the subject is magnified, which she conceptually associates with a terrain, a form of rough and organic indefinite matter, comparing the human being to a macrosystem, like a galaxy or a planet. Here the limit of technology is revealed: the title I is opposed to what the shooting instrument sees (an organic surface); where our thought can see a human being, because we know what it means to say I (what makes us conscious), the machine sees instead just an impersonal organic landscape. The eye is the key to a final reading: the mirror of the soul.


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EGOCRACY - Collective art exhibition

David Detrich
In the artworks of David Detrich we can identify a juxtaposition between the neutrality of the pure, fluid and curious observer, who is gifted of a free and uncrystallised thought, and the representation of the fake superficiality of society, that is the appearance of the consumeristic objects used as lure by the hedonistic world, which feeds the ego alone, with gratification only for the senses, but inconsequential and ending in itself. This comparison has the purpose of facilitating the revelation of a false-reality, what is normalised and propagandised by the economic system of materialism and consumerism through status symbols and induced longings. The synthetic look of the represented objects, along elements recalling the digital world, makes the beholder to conceive the inconsistency of that elaborately phony world, which is inculcated by media and marketing in the imaginary of people, whom existence and actions are dominated by conformism, are ruled by the expectations of society, relegating the person to the enactment of a theatrical role, a play on the stage.

Ines Maria Krämer
Her research is based on the centrality of the human being and those elements connected to the diverse states of the emotional sphere. The artist’s pictorial gesture represents in a concise and iconic way the existential questioning of the individual, whose hieraticism is mitigated by a vibrant chromatic code, which reinterprets the Expressionism in a modern key. The confident and essential strokes recall the clear and often caricaturist style characterising Street Art and contemporary Pop.
A classic subject as the portrait, here becomes something extraneous for the superimposition, or well imposition, of an external element, alien to human nature, that the artist identifies also in the technological instrument, in the electronics, in the virtual existence, applying it in order to transform the subject into a totem, omen and admonishment of the progressive disintegration of human essence, of mankind. In this exogenous element we can espy the prodromes of an incipient transhumanism, which is heading to the surge of an eternal and immutable Ego, as totalitarian as much pointless.

W.K.Lyhne
The large artworks by Lyhne help us to come into contact with the essence of the subject, knowing its story through the close examination of its surface, which represents the register recording its life and the signs of consumption, the wrinkles of facial expression, the scars, but also the way the subject is genetically inclined to appear, or wants to look like, its relational attitudes. Lyhne develops an interest for the most direct and primitive physicality, representing it as coarse surfaces that make both people and still objects seem raw and earthy matter, but with a vibrant vitality and an identity that is revealed in the self-observation, either Selbstbetrachtung or narcissism, turning them into animal bodies, animals with a well-defined and determined character, rich of experiences, narrating. In this sense, it is clear the link between the animal and the vegetal bodies, as suggested by the painting entitled “Mammal”: the initials carved on the bark are both an allegory of the human anthropocentrism, in relation to nature or their counterparts, and a metaphor of the wounds in the flesh and the soul, almost always of the others, inflicted by the hegemonic self, that is the one craving for possession.

Laura Migliorino
Laura Migliorino cultivates a deep interest in the investigation of the emotional, existential and social aspects that permeate the life of individuals, thanks to an analytic taste for aesthetics and a personal sensibility grown in the field of photography during a fruitful exhibition curriculum and as teacher.
In the photographic series “Absentia”, the house, the dwelling, primordial metaphor of the human body as an ark enclosing the soul and the personality, is represented in its aspect of abandoned vestiges. Like a skeleton, a fossil artefact, the house tells us about the lifestyle of its inhabitants, stories of an existence attracted by the appearance of things, which is suggesting an attachment to the culture of the status symbol and a more than privileged life when compared to the longings of soul, with the humble and minimal necessities of the living being as a creature animated by the intellect or the spirit. We take for granted that we need all the things that society taught us or induced us to desire, but, all those things, once abandoned, appear for what they are: a waste of resources and proofs of all the time subtracted to the elevation of the spirit, in other words the inhabitant of the “house.”

Amie Neri
The paintings by Amie Neri are able to establish an immediate empathy with a public gifted of a special sensibility for the more fundamental questions of philosophy linked to existence, that in the psyche determine the aptitudes and the behaviour of an individual, as a response to the personal experiences in the relation with others. Thanks to a suspended, oneiric imaginary and to chromatisms that favour introspection, the paintings induce clarity and predispose to meditation, the temporal pause where to linger observing, beyond the painting, oneself. Subdivided in elemental series, the artist’s work deals with specific implications of the relationship, the condition, the causes, and analyses with a therapeutic intent the trauma of the endured spiritual scars. It is no coincidence that the subjects animating the “emotional rooms” of her paintings are children, who are too often victims of that subtle violence, not always physical, but so common as much as considered normal, that would like to annihilate them, bending their natural personality to the economic hegemony of a society made in the imagine of subjugators. Those “children” are also among the adults.

Alexandra Tudosia
Alexandra Tudosia creates paintings where matter clearly has a central role, but it is found in two antithetical and complementary forms. The first one, the most obvious, consists in the thematic subjects and in the selection of materials used to represent them; the second one, more subtle, is related to morality and the philosophical considerations on the materialist attitudes of those human beings who, entrapped in pragmatism, can not perceive the cosmos in its metaphysical complexity. Matter, utilised or represented, becomes admonishment, for it is relating to earth, meant as soil that receives the remains of life, as decay, deterioration or oxidation. In the paintings animated by figures, the persons are grotesque or deformed, sometimes compared to rats committing the most visceral actions, for whom the artist does not conceal a proud and evident reproach, for both the ones laying on the privileges granted by the elites and the hoi polloi ruled by baser instincts, both joining the same ethic misery.

Hanwen Zhang
Hanwen Zhang pursues a conceptual and analytical research path on the main elements of social existence, such as the identity of the individual, the role and the belonging. The artist is conscious of the pragmatic approach of man in the relation with nature, of the interpretation of the surrounding environment done by the individual through an egocentric filter, essentially utilitarian or opportunistic. Because of this limited and dichotomic relativism, the individual excludes the possibility to conceive a metaphysical reality, beyond the appearance of social relations. The photomontage series “A Real Fake Artist” is a natural consequence of this research. Utilising 3D computer graphics he recreates a double of himself, as actor that can also represent that Self of whatever other individual, or the one that we may encounter through telematics, in the vanity fairs of social networks, those electronic non-places where there are hanging multitudes of egos born to beg the appreciation of others, in the mutual trade of consensus and sharing, because educated to fake their own role, to build up their own public image.
In this series the virtual double represents the image of oneself, but it appears displaced, it does not coincide with its supposed position, for the purpose of creating the surreal Dada paradox, that is the breach opened in the fiction of the “reality”, from which to escape.


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EGOSOPHY - Collective art exhibition

Parul Bouvart
The personality may be innate, but strengthens with the experiences, above all when they put us on the test, so they give us the chance to increase our inner force. Parul Bouvart, through the sublimation process that is possible thanks to the artistic expression, by using either a symbolism made tangible with evocative objects and materials beside the more direct eloquence of performance, strengthens her resistance and personal determination, sharing with others those essential steps in the human journey, with a particular stress on the female condition as well, up to the composition of a totemic indications system.
In other words, Bouvart’s variegated expressive context is based on the ability of turning the sorrow and the circumstances of interdiction into sapiential matter, that is spiritual nourishment. It is like a shamanic healing process practised by going through the metaphysical dimension of mind, where the body represents just the gate of access.

Cyborg Art Collective
The artworks of Cyborg Art Collective, despite centred on the employment of technologies such as virtual or augmented reality, artificial intelligence, new media and telematics, are far from supporting a transhumanist evolution, that is the enhancement of human abilities and the reaching of a man-machine singularity, instead they offer the chance to estrange the ego, to relativise the self, the person, that in the human and earthly dimension has familiar sensory features, visual, auditive, tactile, but when seen through other cognitive paradigms, it would look different, alien. The matter is nothing more than a structure made of electromagnetic particles, a cloud of significant data. This exercise of self-alienation is necessary to catch who we are and who we may become, it is the revelation of the Plato’s cave that gives us the chance to come out, to expand the bounds of our thought.

Gabriel Embeha
In nature, we can observe the omnipresence of repetition, which is normally suppressed totally from our perception. The similarity between specimens or individuals of the same kind, whatever crystals, daisies, insects or people, represents a fractal mathematical model where the repetition is at the base of the cosmic synchronisms of a holographic universe, which is taking us back to mystical concepts such as Word of God and Creation, either divine or demiurgic. Gabriel Embeha loves to investigate those aspects of the least obvious reality of the universe, either from a visual-material and verbal-conceptual points of view, placing the alleged unchangeability of our ego in front of the destabilising vision of a split and reaching an infinite replication by superimposition. As observing one’s own image reflected in the mirror, but seen from the back, one is lifted to the awareness that we are not unique, but multiple, shared. Our ego does not belong to an exclusive domain, but it is part of a shared ancestral system, either at metaphysical and cultural levels.

Valentina Lari
The strong emotive impact characterising Valentina Lari’s artworks arises from that frank and disenchanted acuity of those who are gifted, or have the sensibility acquired with experiences, of being able to catch the deep psychic essence of the human being, being able to observe it as an actor on the metaphoric stage of the existential theatre.
With this uncommon perceptive ability it is possible to see those aspects that are often obscure, as the world of a superficial society prefers to deny, omit and repress them, like ghosts to be forgotten, but that coexist in the same space and share the apparent reality of everyone, in every moment in life, the subconscious to which everybody soon or later will have to deal with.
In the photographic pictures of her repertoire, as much variegated as consistently characterised, the technical and composition competence is not virtuosity, but it permits the artist to reach that mesmeric strength that captures the beholders, pushing them to live the scene, estranging themselves for a moment, necessary condition to reconsider one’s own certainties and self-confidence, and consider the others’ ones.

Nikolaos Mantziaris
The artistic dimension of Nikolaos Mantziaris originates along with a fervid personal urge to pose questions on human society, while both grow with the accumulation of philosophical observations raised facing the evidence of acts rather than the justification of reasons.
This inclination to judge the society by its facts is evidently due to the scientific education of the artist and his knowledge of the material tangibility of human existence, of its potential but also of its flaws and physical transience, an inclination that is showing also on the meticulous care for the materials used fin the creation of the artworks.
Mantziaris reaches a vision of the human condition that is all-embracing, lucid and impartial, necessarily merciless since empathic, taking on the responsibility to keep the social debate and the chance to change the world alive. Artist and person coexist as proof of the obsolescence of the dichotomy between sacred and profane.

Tim Rudolph
Tim Rudolph acknowledges the great efforts of the philosophic mind to spread in the collectivity, which is kept profane and is dominated by the mass culture that mystifies every access to the knowledge of cosmos, this is to say it conceals the exit from Plato’s cave.
Rudolph understands the fundamental role of the word, as natural tool of divulgation, but at the same time considering it an imprecise and distracting protocol in representing the inner complexity of mental pictures, which are interconnected more through symbolic similitude than by verbal association, to the point that explanation schemes and logic diagrams are needed, as in the assembly of a planetarium of reason.
The outcome of the research, as fundamental conceptual summary, is then transposed on common found materials, as emblematic simulacra of the materialist society, over which the artist, refusing rhetoric aesthetics, intervenes with the use of graphical aesthetics, that confers a taste of otherness to the conceptual elements passed to the collectivity, to evoke the need for a cognitive effort and for open-mindedness.

Stefano Sansoni (Orma)
In the artistic expression of Stefano Sansoni, known as Orma, the highest thought that conscience may develop is something so essentially intimate and transcendental that it can not conform easily to the interpretation passing through the interface of a communication protocol like language or writing, neither to the own individual filter of who has received it.
In his artworks we find complex traces and evocations that go beyond the chances offered by images, which resort to the visual and tangible experiences of life, but not dissolving in the abstraction.
Those traces, not having the limit of representation, assume multiple appearances: unintelligible phrases, ideograms and cryptic marks, fields, shapes and doodles; they are mnemonic clues seemingly coming from the Akashic dimension and remind us about the existence of an entire cosmos beyond our sensory shell, helping us to expand our perception outside the Id.

Andrew Shaw
Andrew Shaw instils in The Silent Academy the perfect ideal of thought sharing, free from any interest or hypocrisy, since it disregards the separation between herald and receiver. The most noble concern of the human being is to do good deeds to others expecting nothing in return, and the outline of anonymous cooperation between different artists inspires such vocation.
The concept, according to which, if we want to live in a better world then we must apply ourselves to make it better, is applied in the project explicitly, going beyond the simple interaction actor-spectator, asking the beholder to participate, to enter into the artistic and creative process, to feel free to carry out that change, at least in one’s own mind: to improve oneself assures already that improvement to the world.
The Silent Academy was born in the digital natives’ epoch, where the multimedia means are always more spread among people at any social level and worldwide, but beside utilising social media the artist develops on-site projects, proving awareness about the dangers of the inhumanity caused by virtuality.


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VITA TUA, VITA MEA - Art and Interrelations

“I was brought up feeling that art is a very important part of one’s life. It’s something that I not only enjoy, it’s something I can share with others.” - David Rockefeller

Preface

I wanted to introduce the exhibition with a quote from a personality recently passed away who in some aspects may be controversial or hated by many: the eminent magnate and remarkable art collector David Rockefeller; for two reasons: the first one is because an artist, when he creates a work of art, he could never decide who can love it and who can not, in which collection it will end up one day: the artist with his artwork does an unconditional act of altruism.
The second reason, regardless of the merits or the demerits that one may have to live in this world, is that a thought, a phrase, a statement, is something absolute, it is a meaning that must be read for what it reads per se, and maybe it represents the most profound ideal, the true dream of who is expressing it.

VITA TUA, VITA MEA

With the title “Viva Arte Viva” (viva means either alive or hurray) the 57th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia.launches once again a message of optimism, or more sceptically of illusion, secluding art into a no man’s land, an enclave where to set it free from the responsibilities and the troubles of reality.
Let us welcome with pleasure this optimism, but with a grain of salt, since the Biennale still seems wanting to ignore the contemporary social context. It is not possible to alienate from the international socio-political and economic situation: the unrest of entire countries perpetrated with wars or rigged monetary crises do not hit the headlines more than the umpteenth summer gossip scandal, incommensurable disparities between super-rich and oppressed people, constant erosion of human rights and freedom both in new capitalism and in the regimes of developing countries, dictatorship of this as an alternative to the dictatorship of that. It is unacceptable that the art world sticks its head in the sand, isolating itself in a sugar-coated elitism, into a soap bubble, just to offer tourists an amusing festival; that is not the purpose of art, it is not the carefree diversion: art served since ever to reflect on reality, in order to imagine another one.

VITA TUA, VITA MEA is an antithesis of the famous Latin motto “mors tua, vita mea” (your death is my life), precursor of the opportunistic and egocentric model where the modern socio-economic world has been founded on, in order to propose instead a model of personal wellness as a consequence of the wellness of the society, which is a textile of relations: if you stress them beyond measure, the textile tears, causing epochal crises like the ones we are witnessing.

Art and interrelations

As Giordano Bruno wrote in his Triginta sigillorum explicatio, poets, painters and philosophers love and admire one each other: a feeling of empathy between artists and thinkers in general do exist, a form of superior respect that crosses the barriers of diversity, regardless of the individual ideological needs, because it comes from people so liberal that they can comprehend even the illiberal.
The arts, the expressions of the human action, are often subdivided into specialisations, into technical disciplines, sometimes exclusive because they require much practise to be mastered, but among them obviously there is a unique longing, an interrelation grouping the artists: freedom. On the other side, the interdisciplinary artists, since Leonardo to this day always more in larger numbers, can be considered also interrelational artists because they oppose and demolish the specialisation, that instrument with which the economic system subjugates people since ever, depriving them of the widest free will, of one’s own pleasure, turning them into mechanisms, or the gears that move the deus ex machina of profit.

From another point of view, contemporary art, considered by many an aesthetic practise often self-referential and without a practical usefulness, is indeed the interrelational glue of society, because the artist creates relations between aesthetics and applied technique making his own works starting from the metaphysical dimension to explicate it with symbolistic interpretations, just like when one prefers to render a picture of a thought rather than to explicate it. For example, trends are behavioural proposals directed to the society through visual or aesthetic memes.
Lastly, as I always assert, in first stance art is message, is always relational in itself; even going back to the most archaic form of artistic expression, the portrait, we realise how much art is fundamentally relational.

Moreover today, with telecommunications, the interrelations have become the most significant phenomenon of contemporary society, albeit the exponential increase of connections has nothing to do with communication, because it is limited to the mere gossip of memes foisted by centres of economic power or to the abuse of self-referentialism. There is a need for artists proposing a smarter use of the available technologies: some tried to do the same with television, but notwithstanding that it has now irremediably become a domestic electrical appliance like a washing machine, that washes and do the spin cycle on brains.

Even if descendant or mimicking the Fluxus of John Cage and George Maciunas, in the contemporary epoch a relational art is taking shape, as you can imagine it reading Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, to which we may ascribe in a heterogeneous way artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, Cesare Pietroiusti or Scott Snibbe. Relational is one of the latest adjectives that are always more used in the artistic field; in fact it is just the mirror of this historic period where the global mass connection is predominant. Merging with the flow of performance, a discipline attracting more and more artists, and thanks to the close consideration for the centrality of the human being, probably relational art is destined to become one of the biggest forms of expression in the times to come, promoting that evolutional process of the human expression toward a meta-verbal communication form, expressionist if you like.

The centrality of human relations go beyond the mono-directionality of the work of art, crossing the barrier between the artist and the public, searching the interrelation, that is the interaction between the actor and the audience, getting spectators involved and making them participating sometimes physically, but in first stance emotionally, up to become co-authors of the artwork.

Sometimes contemporary art has forgotten the necessary involvement of the observer, becoming something incomprehensible and detached, in a dichotomy between sacred and profane. It is better to remember that interpersonal relations can be the most critical aspect in the life of an artist, in better or worse, besides the fact that the most intense art often springs from a feeling for a person or a category of persons, for the affections and the passions, or the pain.

The recent case of Salvador Dalì, whose remains risk to be exhumed for a possible bloodline test, reminds us that sometimes human relations can move things that not even an artist could ever imagine.


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ELATE MEMORIES - Collective art exhibition

Introduction

Elate Memories continues the thematic subject started with the previous exhibition Future and Behind where the certainty and the values of our past were set against the instability of a crumbling modern society characterised by the uncertainty due to the feebleness’ prospects of the future.

This time we want to investigate the role that memory and remembrances have in being happy. Elate memories is an exhortation to search serenity within ourselves, in our experience and knowledge: cheer up, exult for the memories.

Amusement, joy, optimism and exultation are often connected to light heartedness, holidays, diversion in the search for newness, but equally we can find these mood feelings in the cultural heritage, in the traditions. The ephemeral present becomes immortal in the memento.

Our present condition is the result of our past, of all our life, of the best choices we could ever have made. To be here and now is by itself indeed the outcome of a past full of successes.

Mass memories

We live in the selfie epoch, commonly recognised as voluptuary expression of the most superficial and individualist carefreeness, made possible by the pervasive availability of mobile phones of thousand uses, real prosthesis of the being, vanguard of the transhumanism.
They are called smartphones, intelligent telephones; well, it seems that they have replaced this brain’s function in some people, even making them to appear more capable, while indeed they are addicted to the bionic symbiosis, especially in the ability to remember, by now largely delegated to the near-infallibility of the silicon memories; but, how many people lost their memories along with their own tablet, maybe ended in stranger’s hands? And this is just one of the consequences caused by the expulsion of memory from the own inner being.

Remembering Fromm, after all if the technological temptation has not yet succeeded in subjugate the humans to the craze of “having”, then it corrupts them in their deepest essence: the “being.”

Anyway, billions of people produce thousands billions of pictures that, even when superficial or insignificant in front of the immense global amount, they assume a role of visual memory, today perhaps a negligible expression of the individualistic need for being at the centre of attention, but that some day will inevitably become collective memory, like the yellowed vintage photographs you may find on street markets today are: memory of beauty, memory of happy times, memory to denounce or commemorate an event. Each photograph, picture or work of art is memory in itself.

Some say that with time our mind fades unpleasant memories, leaving us an edulcorated picture of the past: that is not so to everybody; to many memory is painful, so much unbearable to need suppression.
But actually nothing of what happens is universally regrettable, because in the cosmos everything can lead back to a purpose that transcends the individual relativism. The interpretation of the occurrences depends on the point of view, on the personal attitude in front of the events. The memory is not nice or bad, but its value is always positive. This is not a question of nostalgia: the memory represents our experiential background, indispensable to face the world in a lucid and aware way.

Art, despite that is the representation of the thought pointing toward the future, is always a re-elaboration of cultural memory, that is the consequence of our past experiences; but above all it is a metalanguage with which we give shape to the intellect, soul or subconscious, or the vital essence that the technocratic society would wish to annihilate in favour of a robot-man, ignorant and excellent productive machine suiting the requirements of exclusive thinking elites. Also for this reason memory should be taken under big consideration by people, because it can keep us free and away from possible slaveries and devious subjugations; right, as mankind is historically susceptible to habit-forming: thanks or cause of its adaptation ability, it gets accustomed to any condition. Without a fundamental point, a precise existential ideal impressed in memory, the human being slowly conforms itself to the ever changing order of current time, up to become even totally dependent on its own state of subjugation.

Notoriously, modern art stood out right in the progressive self-determination that led it to the contemporary explosion of expressive styles, in several cases turning out to be the only fortress of freedom. It is during Renaissance that this sentiment emerged again, pushing some artists in the search for an emancipation from the subjection to the commission, which since Middle Ages relegated them to the condition of mere executing artisans, manufacturers of other’s wills.
Since then, art returned to be that archaic metalanguage aimed to the expression of self and ending in itself.
Art is as much materially useless as spiritually indispensable. Let us think about the cave paintings made by our prehistoric ancestors: serene recollections, sometimes disquieting epochs of fight, but in any case great events to remember, memorable deeds.
Currently, the glorification of memorable events is quite an out of practice habit: apart the disdained festivities considered just for the vacations, what people do passionately commemorate today? The street festival? The winning of a soccer match? A birthday? A general flaccid indetermination dominates, where many people feel like gripped by worries, instead of being vigorous for the awareness of panta rei, attempting to hide the insecurity in the materialist excesses, desperately trying to “live” as much as possible, but perhaps never grasping its meaning.
This incertitude generated by the lack of aims built on the base of own inner memory and a conscious rationalisation of own existence, lead even more toward the craving for the accumulation of memories in places that are external from our mind, like photos of flash-vacations, that is too busy at keeping the frenzy of a momentary living. The memory is being expelled from our inner, relegated in the memory card of a mobile telephone, it becomes a mere datum for possible use, like archived into dusty annals, dislocated from our Self, thus not naturally accessible any more and, in short, forgotten.

To evoke making own: it is one of the reasons for art does exist, like philosophy and poetry too, that Art spurring us to think, to conceive.

To be, rather than to have, memories.

The art that changes the future

Ancient cave graffiti or allegorical Egyptian wall paintings, Gilanic artifacts or statues from ancient Greece, all testaments of a living that have survived centuries or millenniums, returning archaic images, scenes from an ideal panorama and observations on the cosmic mistery of existence, created not by the divine, but by people, artists who have interpreted their own divine experience, immortalising it in artworks that have inspired and where the following civilisations have developed.

This way it happens that artists re-elaborate the past, that is the existing material, and transform it into future, like Marcel Duchamp with his readymade inspired us to see the reality with different eyes, reconsidering things unconditionally; or like Cindy Sherman1 who makes use of the collective imagination to reconsider herself, modifying and moulding her own appearance as it was a plastic substance.
The Duchampian teaching today is broadly put in practice in its most contemporary implementation, the so called “recycle art”, but the fundamental need to re-elaborate the existent is expressed also by the artists who love to reproduce on their creations the deterioration of the artworks from the past, as if it was conferring the same old solemnity.

The proof that culture lives in the constant reconsideration of the existing material can be found in the recurring rising of movements revamping previous schools of thought, for example like the Pre-Raphaelites one, or the Symbolism of Gustave Moreau and of Odilon Redon, or more simply also in the stylistic innovation of classical myths proposed by painters like Anselm Kiefer or William Blake.

So many artists are particularly inspired by the recollection, which was lingering indelibly impressed into the soul, from which it re-emerges in an irrepressible way, to the point that it pushes them to represent it in order to satisfy that natural instinct of sharing own experiences with others, painting from memory. For example, in his naive drawings, an elderly self-taught Alfred Wallis 2 evokes the pictures from his past life passed between harbours and ships; or also, the so amazing mnemonic ability of the autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire 3, who can reproduce immense urban panoramas extremely in detail after just few minutes of observation.

The serene lucidity that an artist feels when he creates mnemonically takes origin right from the immersion into memory, that is an exercise for wellness that can be experienced by anyone, even not painting. We can perceive it for example in the famous boxes full of memories made by Joseph Cornell 4.

To Roman Opalka, the preservation of memory has even been the supreme and self-sufficient essence of his own artworks: for all his life he was engaged in immortalising exclusively the aseptic datum of the flowing time over his own life, painting and recording progressive numbers, then combining them to the imperceptibly slow but constant ageing of his own face, every day.

We can verify this great power of the representation of memories in the fact that they are really changing the future of the society: in fact most of the artists, even carrying out the selfsame work of transformation, do not paint making use of their own memory, but of the others’ memory, of the collective memory, which is not experienced directly through own senses. For example, painters like Henri Rousseau and Antonio Ligabue were painting wild and exotic scenes even if they have never been in those places. It does not matter if the result would be improbable or incoherent, because the purpose of art is not just to represent the experiences, but right also to re-elaborate them, transforming them.

Often the artworks acquire value only when they become themselves memory, that is when they loose their state of being contemporary, when they become absolute because not tied any more to the current thought; that happened to many photographers who portrayed their context and whose work has been reconsidered only successively by attentive people, as in the case of Eugène Atget 5, Francesca Woodman or Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.

In any epoch, to many artists the beauty and genius loci of nature are the subject to be delivered to immortal memory: landscape painters as Albert Bierdstadt, Thomas Cole or Salvator Rosa have represented solemn wild scenes that have kept the sentiment for environment alive until today.

Artists like Christian Boltanski and Jannis Kounellis instead express their attention for human memory realising impressive and contemplative artworks made with used material and personal images of painful kind, often installed like heaps or archives of memories with an unbearable weight.

Sometimes memory can even become an obsession, as in the case of Mark Rothko, whose tragic childhood memories have probably marked the character of his painting, which represents anyway their sublimation, a distillation or transformation into something acceptable to be transmitted separated from the horror.

It is true that the sublimation of the personal sorrow is one of the roles of art, but in many cases it happens that the anguish is being reiterated and re-proposed to the world, transmitting to the society that model always requiring the need for penance to reach happiness.
To this sake, the purpose of this exhibition is also to promote an arbitrarily filtered memory, returning a serene picture of the past, so that it would make a model that is suitable to develop an ideal future, just like when a land is being prepared to receive the cultivations, making it fertile.
After all, like George Orwell teaches us in the novel “1984”, who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past: the artists can decide today which model to give to society where to build a better future.

Critical gloss

Daria Baiocchi in “1916” evokes atmospheres of reminiscence, traces apparently forgotten, like DNA of a creature that has not become extinct, but that is smoothly surviving at the bottom of an abyss, in the wait for the favourable conditions to return to light, like an ancient seed designed to resist extremely hostile conditions that finally sprouts on the appropriate time.

Anne-Cathrin Brenner with the small series of watercolours entitled “Heimat” asks the public to call into question own social belongings. Heimat is a German word that literally can be translated with homeland, but it has meanings more ample that range on the social belonging indeed, the patriotic feeling, the traditions and the home. Like decomposing the heimat in something like an alphabet, the artist succeed in making us understand that is nothing more than images into our memory, thus the true home, that place where we feel happy, is made of memories.

Claire Burke is interested in the obsolescence, typical of technology. In her works regarding the analog video, supplanted by the digital one, the shapes and the colours that are part by now of the collective imaginary, are being manipulated through a improper reproduction transforming them into indistinct and hypnotic haloes, which induce that sensation of feeble resurfacing of the memory.

Despite the title “Malinconia” (Melancholy), the collage of Albino Caramazza seems emanating an intense good fragrance, hinted by the monochromatisms warm and deep like coffee, but also by the flower. The artist to create the original collages utilises exclusively sugar sachets, that are obviously recalling the very Italian habit of the coffee break, which is suggesting everyone that nice moment occurring regularly in the days of a life.

Lily-Orthodoxia Christou transmits her own inner being and memory trying to keep an unconditional expression of the form, not subordinated to prerequisites, and fluid like the thought itself, leaving to the public the task to perceive convergences with own sentiments, that the title “Innocence” suggests they could be found in the childhood memories.

The artistic expression of Elle is based on the examination and the re-elaboration of the memories and the implications of psyche, interpreted through the reuse of humble materials of anthropic origin where she feels a metaphysical potential, elevating them to the status of magical relic. In the series “Ripola” she does manipulate Polaroid photos through material applications and chemical damaging to transfigure what essentially was a visual memory by completing it with inner perceptions. The installation “Cloud” represents the imaginative ability to recognise shapes in the clouds, the pareidolia making us to project figures on them because already existing into our memory; the sculpture is like illuminated by lightnings recalling the electric pulses that activate the synapses in the instant of recollection; the title is referring to that collective memory represented by the computer systems of remote archiviation.

Benna Gaean Maris wanted to deliver full sovereignty to the word alone, instrument for the manifestation of feelings that comes just after the body expression, presenting us a poem to transmit a positive empathy for memory.

The stylistic hallmark of Alfredo Gioventù’s unmistakable ceramics is directly drawn from the memory of natural forces, the recording of geomorphic precesses manifested in the striping of the characteristic stones then smoothed by the sea. The sculpture “Daphne” is inspired to the homonymous mythological figure in the search for an aesthetic perfection, a condition of superior and contemplative pureness aiming to intellectually rejoice for the nature, by uniting with it.

With the painting “Memories Dream Choice”, Claudia Grimaldi visualises images representing her own experiential background to which she relied in the existential choices, that we all face sometimes. Thus the artist does not offer her own moral lesson, indeed she wants to provide a symbolic and evocative patterns collection that is distinct but familiar to the observer, through the estranging tones of a black and white film.

Darren Houser obliterates the classic imaginary of memento mori composing a fine and modern allegory that crosses the miserable reprimand in favour of a lucid consciousness of one’s own aims and a clear vision of our future: the experience can bring fruits only with the determination to proceed toward an ideal, otherwise its destiny is the consumption in inconclusive paths.

The preservation of memory is a consolidated base in the research of Winnie KS Hui. The series “To the Infinity” has been painted from memory, making use of own and collective imaginary, employing the traditional oriental brush technique on rice paper. The naturalistic images, nearly oneiric presences searching for materialisation, reiterate the essence of the ecstasy that great authors of the past experienced in front of the memorable landscapes along the Yellow River, which are today progressively undermined by a blind and ruthless exploitation, for it is even more necessary to preserve them, at least into memory.

Caren Kinne makes use of her own memory and of the aesthetics inherited by cultures and styles from diverse epochs, but going beyond the simple visual representation of memories, in order to propose to the observer a vigorous imaginary but as more neutral and versatile as possible, made of fundamental elements, similar to tantric paintings or tiles of a metaphysical, meta-material puzzle, that everyone can integrate and match with one’s own, up to form new inner landscapes.

A superior engagement in social news often leads Mar.Gu to counterpoise vices and virtues, setting the miserable contemporary fallacies in contrast to the recollection of the certainties of a recent past that easily annihilate falsity, immediately awaking the conscience from the hypnotic sleep induced by propaganda. In the painting “Quando la Zecca non era un albergo” (When the Mint was not a hotel) the simple writings on a 500 Liras banknote remind us how the Res Publica is by now a fleeting memory.

The painter Mary M. creates almost exclusively from memory; her imagination makes use of personal recollections, in particular going back to childhood and adolescence lived in a sunny Tuscany, in that epoch characterised by the joy and the ecstasy of a rural society with centuries-old traditions and suddenly erased by the abrupt run to modernity in the forthcoming postwar. Her paintings evoke happy memories full of poetry from a natural world, landscapes full of life and colours, today completely transformed in monotone expanses of industrialised glyphosate flavoured monocultures.

Abramo ‘Tepes’ Montini often resorts to a pop and personal modern symbology, sometimes combined to classic allegories, to explicate a precise conceptual objective as much refined and subtle as surreal and vague, with the purpose to leave the observer free to readjust it to own self. In “underglass 4” the glass dome represents again a preotective element, a time capsule preserving the memory of self, of the most infantile and pure own essence, other than of own genetic makeup.

The video “Attempting the Island” by Jaakko Myyri investigates on how the mass-media culture inherited from the contemporary world could be re-elaborated to reach one’s own ideal of serenity, through the documentation of feelings and considerations recorded during a tour in United Kingdom of the band The Scenes. The questioning of the precepts is not due only to the sentiment of rebellion, but is the selfsame mechanism that is pushing the artists toward the creation of new models of future.

The artwork “Servez-vous!” (Help yourself!) by Sanchis at first sight represents in an immediate and very raw way an exhortation and the willpower to change the status quo, principal function of the artists; but another fundamental intent is also the evocation of historical memories that are repeating, in fact the installation is dedicated to the as much revolutionary famous painting “La liberté guidant le peuple” by Delacroix: both have in common the same will to create a better world, destroying the chains that are preventing the reaching of happiness.

The frank and sunny video-portrait that Giuliana Silvestrini dedicates to her mother is the contemporary implementation of the tribute with which the artists of any epoch have thanked or commemorated they who have made possible their happiness. By positively representing the traditions of one’s own ancestors, their endorsement is being revealed, or perhaps the nostalgic feeling to not be able to pursue them in the current society.

The style and the chromaticism in the paintings created by Elle Smith always lead to a feeling of steadiness and of serenity, even when they are dealing with introspective or existential themes. The artist achieves this result by iconifying the shapes, making them similar to pictographs that are easily readable. The work “Purple Rain”, the common saying to define an impossible dream, other than suggesting that the happiness have to be pursued even if it seems out of reach, also gives afterwards honour to the memory of the recently passed away musician Prince. Instead, “Thinking Outside the Box” is exhorting to get rid of the negative memes, which are interdicting to take advantage of the experience by instilling uncertainty.

The video “Pulse Generator Pastry” by Charles Woodman is a generational tribute with which he pays honour to the art of his mother, the renowned ceramist Betty Woodman, appropriating the shapes she utilises to transform them into electronic memory, reiterating them in order to be surely extended to an ubiquitous existence. Notwithstanding the psychedelic flickering of the electronic signal, the simplicity of the shapes, in which the observer may recognise familiar figures, successfully evoke a feeling of tranquillity.

Serena Zanardi draws inspiration either from the contemplation of collective memory and her own recollections to create works permeated by an atmosphere of solemn serendipity, of wonder for the finding in ancient images of one’s own human nature, unchanged, unitary and communal. The burden of responsibility imparted by the even comforting awareness of the social belonging, is being relieved by a subtle open-minded and mutable spirit.


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FUTURE AND BEHIND - (Un)contemporary art exhibition

Introduction

The 56th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia has been entitled “All the World’s Futures”, a title that perhaps would be more appropriate with an ending question mark. We live in present times characterised by agitations at a planetary level, by the fragmentation of thought, by the crumbling of ideals, where the disinterest in searching justice and respect is raging, where the past is repudiated, erased, or adjusted according to one’s own interests.
In their introductory speeches, Paolo Baratta and Okwui Enwezor, respectively President and Curator of the Biennale, clearly proved to be conscious of the no more negligible extent of social uproars, to the extent that you can feel they disguised some hesitation proposing a title so obstinately positivist and evoking hopeful prospects.
Carefully examining the reality of facts, the worrisome worldwide socio-economic lack of balance is caused by radical injustices exacerbated beyond any tolerance, and searching at any cost a way out in the prospects of future rather seems rhetoric for the last Titanic’s lifeboat.

FUTURE AND BEHIND is an exhibition aimed to answer with critical sense to the prospects hinted by the title of this Biennale. Through the artworks of the invited artists, impartially selected for the motivations on the argument, it explicates a thematic itinerary deliberately biased: starting from the concept held in the phrase “aka-ta qhipa uru”, that in the language of Aymara people means “from now to behind”, this exhibition wants to suggest that if we want to see what are the good things in our hands, from which to restart, we must inevitably look at the past.
The mentality of Aymara people is characterised by a one-of-a-kind and antithetical conception of time: unlike the contemporary man, who imagines himself transiting in the present with the future in front and the past behind, Aymaras see themselves with the past in front and the future behind.

The past is the future

The idea of FUTURE AND BEHIND was born to investigate on how human mind perceives the relationship between future and past, and how time conjecturally interfere with the actions in the present. The initiative can be considered as a due continuation of the question started with the “ecointegralist” exhibition OIKOS dedicated to the relationship between man and environment, while the title was chosen in contrast to the one of the 56th Art Biennial of Venice.

The idea was conceived as soon as the title “All the World’s Futures” for the 56th edition of the Biennale was announced, wanting to be in juxtaposition against the prospects it evoked.
In the global context we witness wide humanitarian issues, masses of people forced to migrate, harsh social injustice, prevarications, wars. We wonder: but, of which futures are we talking about? We are in the middle of a planetary disaster, into ethical decline, pollution, financial speculation and worsening of conflicts, a world at the mercy of the lowest couldn’t-care-less attitude, of mors tua vita mea, of thoughtlessness caused by cynicism and greed.
How can you look to the future, if the world where you are going to walk is already crumbling under the feet? Shall we have to climb over the corpses of the fallen ones to look beyond?
Perhaps we should instead roll up our sleeves, cure what is corrupted and strengthen what remains.

Later, during the presentation of the 56th edition, and surprisingly in contrast with the title of the Biennale, the President Paolo Baratta has proved to have a remarkable care for the memory and the past, that was expressed with the metaphor that the history is inexorably growing like a mountain, in addition to the awareness of the social turmoil by calling this epoch “Age of Anxiety.”
Therefore, FUTURE AND BEHIND is rather in harmony with these words he said, to the extent that it could be considered an external contribution composed of thirty-one voices that, for the sake of plurality, are answering to his “Parliament of Forms”, this is to say joining the voices of the one hundred thirty-six artists summoned by the Curator Okwui Enwezor, who has surely been chosen for his personal awareness about these social issues.

In the presentation of the Biennale held by Enwezor, the reference to the interpretation of Angelus Novus by Paul Klee in the theses of history of philosophy by Walter Benjamin¹ is an astounding coincidence: it may seem implausible, but the similarity to the metaphor of Aymara’s philosophy is sincerely fortuitous.

The evocation of the issues and the horrors in contemporary society done by the President of the Biennale during the presentation, albeit commendable, is limited to the mere awareness. You can comprehend that for a reality as complex as the Biennale, that has to to uphold both its own existence and the involved partners, to be exposed politically against the state of facts and interests, which go far beyond the ones of artistic cosmetics, may be difficult. You can go further than the simple tourist circumnavigation of the events, deepening the reasons, searching for the causes and possibly revealing the responsibilities.
But it is exactly the metaphor of the Angelus Novus interpretation by Benjamin that makes you perplexed indeed: why not dig your heels and oppose to that storm? Why not fight back? It can not be divine that metaphorical wind which pushes toward the future and pulls away from the past. Surely, time seems to us like a wind that is flowing always and just forward, but man has learnt to sail also against the wind, pointing where he wants, even turning back to the point from where he started, and from this point of view Art is something divine, surely.

Again in spite of the title of the Biennale, many works chosen by Enwezor look to the past, and have a humanist vocation, or humanitarian; that could not be otherwise, considering the origins of the Curator who surely knows the wounds endured by African continent, the wars, where nevertheless many populations have preserved an attachment to the nature and the rurality maintaining a high level of civilisation and respect, similarly to the peasant civilisation in the Western world. This Biennale looks like the inevitable continuation of the discussion opened by the work that we may consider the most touching, amazing and powerful of the last edition: “The Enclave” by Richard Mosse for the Irish pavilion, where the military insanity, with the lure of modernity, insinuates into the ancestral idyll of an agrestic Africa until its dramatic devastation.

The denial of the past or its demolition is a destructive behaviour, it is not by chance that Futurists were incline to war: their works today seem even antiquated, and this let us understand that everything is inevitably tied to the fleeting contemporary and it is a consequence of the past, a reaction to what happened, becoming immediately and inexorably part of the past. To believe in future is a state of agitation that, when taken to the extreme, leads to the destruction of everything in the name of nothing, because the future is just a conjecture.
But this is not pastism, not an inclination for nostalgia: to consider the past means to have the knowledge of what exists, that is the cosmos, to avoid groping around.
The future is by now a stereotype, a blind faith behind which people obstinately barricade since too much, lingering on anaesthetising slogans with no flavours done as a pretext, which look like the affected clichés flaunted in some vernissages by inconclusive protagonists in the brothel of smugness.

What is lacking in this epoch is an impulse, a logical and embraceable motivation. That impulse can not be anymore the obstinacy for the development, since we suffer exactly for an excessive growth: the production and consumerism bulimia has succeeded in plenty of ways to pour out its nefarious consequences even to contexts far away, both in space and time.
Inevitably this fast and hypertrophic development in the name of the future is crumbling for the lack of a steady base, as it happens for the speculative bubbles; you can see that in the effects of the so called economical crisis. A bursting bubble leaves no traces but a diaphanous residue, and magically reveals the only certain thing it concealed: the past, formed at slow pace, by sedimentation.

The same need from which artistic expression originates, that is materialised in the works of art, has the purpose to immortalise the prior events, to leave contemporary traces of the experience, so that they may be observed in the future, as in the attempt to mark the path that has been covered by mankind.

The works of art are at our disposal in moments of crisis, when we will find ourselves in a blind alley or the ground will be crumbling under the feet.

Let us ponder, look back to find again the way we have travelled, evaluating if it was the right one, let us understand what is the past we are from.

Even the text you have just read is a message from the past.


(Un)contemporary art

Venice is a perfect metaphor for the constant mutation of the things: it is a city deeply different confronted to that of the past, with that lazy Mannian relaxedness and the harmony impressed in the 50s film “I nua” (they swim) by Enzo Luparelli, that today have been replaced by the opportunistic economy of mass tourism, turning the Lagoon into an enormous theme park, like an entangled Riviera Romagnola disguised by solemn and antique stage wings, and populated by actors who play their own role to not disappoint the expectations of tourists.

The present evolves constantly, both in the cultural and technological aspects. Art is the weapon with which we face the future, the unknown, but it is anyway a weapon built with just what we have inherited from the past. Let us allow technology to be projected into the future, but the human essence is always the same, our longing for communication, our vital needs, are the same from the dawn of times.

Art is commonly defined by its coevals as contemporary; actually Art is an immutable concept that is eternal, we should rather call it un-contemporary, but, if it is true that the concept of hic et nunc is the sole reality of the present that is evolving, it is even unnecessary to identify it with any temporal definition.

The artists strengthen this idea of immutable mutability: many take inspiration from the masters of the past, often using or simulating ancient techniques; all respond to the past events by re-elaboration. To a certain extent, all Art is Recycle Art, because everything is created starting from what already exists.

In the exhibition cycle of CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium, each exhibition corpus is usually compared to the global context, searching for parallelisms between the participating artists and the others from the international artistic panorama.
In this case, considering the specificity of FUTURE AND BEHIND, the comparison is limited to the artists included in the concomitant 56th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia.

After the preponderant presence of works of Western and European taste in the last exhibitions “ILLUMInations” and “The Encyclopaedic Palace”, this year many works from the Biennale have a soul that is more contemplative, warm, tribal and generally archaic, obviously thanks to the Curator.

For example, in the assemblages on canvas created by the Cuban Lavar Munroe1 we find the tribal archetypes recalling the ancestral origins of mankind, contaminated by contemporary.

The Mozambican Gonçalo Mabunda2 makes figures, furnitures and more common objects reusing just decommissioned weapons to expose the destructive horror of the wars and their markets. Also the bell that Iraqi Hiwa K. molten with the steel from war weapons reveals the pacifist inclination of the Curator coming from a continent oppressed by conflicts.

The attention for the past is particularly present in the works of Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, as much as in the previous photographic reports by Sammy Baloji3, representing the alienated condition of the human being after the industrial exploitation intruded into cultures otherwise characterised by rural harmony.

The mark, protagonist in the archaic artistic expression, is a very important presence: we can find it for example in the works of aborigine Emily Kame Kngwarreye and of Daniel Boyd4, who investigate the Australian ancestral semiotic legacy.

Zhijie Qiu instead deals with the cyclic nature of history, while David Maljkovic investigates the reiterated reproduction of photographic archiving.

The Abounaddara collective is very active in the safeguard of the past, proceeding with the building of a sort of visual archive of local cultural traditions.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot pays homage to the nature making a real tree into the protagonist, placing it contrastingly in the aseptic rooms. Plants are the protagonists also for Marcel Broodthaers.

Vanessa Beecroft gives up with models in flesh and blood proposing their marble replicas, returning back to the straight artistic longing for immortality.

The absolute un-contemporary is reached through an all-embracing vision of cosmos, of what is surrounding us, and above all what is not surrounding us, what we can not see because metaphysical.
The grandeur of a work of art lies in the balance, when it separates from the conventional representation in order to get closer to conceptual abstraction and yet keeping the ability to communicate and to be understood. The communication is as grander as it is more un-contemporary and universal, distant from the chronicles, in this way a message can be resistant to change and it can be understood in any epoch.

Critical comment

In the works of the artists invited to express the thematic subject of FUTURE AND BEHIND, three orientations can be recognised: one is promoting the revaluation of the past, the cycles of nature and the respect; another, supportively to the first, instead represents with a critical sense the frenetic agitations of that society obstinately projected into the renovation and that is looking only toward the future; a third, finally reflects on the un-contemporary, searching connections between dots scattered in the oblivion through the comparison, the universality or the revaluation, seemingly willing to mend a torn fabric of time and to define a multidimensional point where past and future may coexist.

In the first group we can notice the recurrence of the sentiment for preservation, symbolically expressed with the auxiliary protection represented by the glass dome.
Elle Smith encloses into glass spheres, like soap bubbles, the iconic memories of ideal cities, meant as utopian places, crystallising them in an idyllic poetical imaginary. In this case paying homage to the most fantastic city par excellence, Venice. The bubble symbolises either the longing for preservation and the fragility of memories.
Tete de Alencar resorts to the sculptural assemblage in materialising the sentiment of preservation for the places of thought, naturalistic utopias represented with very exquisite miniatures of vintage taste, enclosed like valuables into protective boxes, in this case a glass dome. The emergence of stereotypes continuously evoked from the past, demonstrates their genuineness and confirms their unavoidable indispensability.
Abramo ‘Tepes’ Montini paints mysterious babies, like preformed reproductions of the adult, that are placed under glass. From the very strong wish to protect them from contingent dangers we deduct that the procreation is the process of regeneration of self in the necessary adaptation to future new conditions. But the glass symbolises also the wish to preserve them, maybe by preventing their birth until more opportune times, or perhaps as if they were our message in the bottle to be delivered to the sea in the hope that it may arrive to future receivers.
Cyclic nature of life, regeneration and remembrance are the fil rouge of the visually diversified paintings by Mary M.: starting from the reproduction of the famous Van Gogh’s sunflowers, and through a naïve self-portrait painted by memory after more than half a century, we arrive to an expressionist vision where we find a deep symbolism in elements such as the dark of nonentity and the tunnel as direction and rebirth.
In the astronauts of Eskild Beck we find again the centrality and the essential self-sufficiency of human being in the immanent journey through the cosmic void, archaic and metaphysical figures of bodies allowing us to travel like spaceships in time and space, with no need for spacesuits.
Claudia-M. Grimaldi, Corsican by adoption, invites us to savour again the bucolic rhythms: nude bodies of a man and a woman are the protagonists of an ideal and rural naturalness recalling past atmospheres and paintings. Since ever, artists from any epoch were engaged in immortalising the thoughts through their works, as corporeal life is regenerating through the eroticism and the mating.
The video “Two birds in a sink.” by B. Quinn contextualises into an ordinary contemporary everyday life two ancient origamis of the crane, which since the ancient times were traditionally given as a gift for wishing a long life, but that since the atomic slaughter of Hiroshima they also commemorate the unfortunate destiny of the little Sadako. Being burned, these two birds turn into phoenixes, the mythological animal that can revive from its own ashes, metaphor of immortality through the regeneration.
The persistence of memory is at the base of the installation “Before It Fades” by Winnie KS Hui, who with commitment reproduces antique Chinese steles severely deteriorated, returning, to what they represent, the same importance that has motivated the original creators in making them. The particular technique utilised and the fragmentary reproducibility of the original remnants blend together into a mystical authority.
Edgar Askelovic resorts to the reconsideration of ancient artifacts, by recalling the Mother Goddess, which is protagonist in cultures of all times: from the countless Paleolithic statuettes up to the modern epoch and through the famous Courbet’s “Origine du Monde”. Even if actualised with the use of a modern synthetic material that makes it looking like an erotic toy, this Venus keeps the capability to ideally represent the essential, immutable and sovereign shape that everybody recognise as the essential prototype of maternal womb.
Leo Jahaan with an accurate historiographical research expressed through pop aesthetics, analyses the transiency of things, reminding us with “Kuku-Oba” that time passing by is an illusion due to the transformation of cosmos, and with “Caretta caretta” that it depends also on the speed of your life. The turtle, with its slowness, is an animal with a very long life, but it is also very fragile when it comes into contact with a world going at high-speed.
The revival of dilated times and of sociality, that are often lost into the excitement of the world, is the purpose of the video by Adrienne Outlaw, who invites us to observe and to give fair importance to those gestures corresponding to ancient and primal needs joined by mankind, like the sharing of food.
The modern man reveals all his presumption in the video by Tiffany Joy Butler, where, with an inflexible sarcasm, a highlight is put over the prejudices about indigenous civilisations, often so deeply rooted to the extent that they endure in the imaginary of many people.

In the second group of works, about the criticism to the frenzied run for the future, the existential disquietude and the danger of dehumanisation in the electronic era are the predominant feelings.
In the video by Marie-France Giraudon & Emmanuel Avenel, the viewer is projected into a psychedelic journey, with the same progression of a Divine Comedy, in the attempt to find the redemption from a modern digital Inferno through the expiation in the Purgatory of virtual reality, that is simulating a natural Paradise, which attainment is however not guaranteed.
“Job Interview” by Dénes Ruzsa & Fruzsina Spitzer is a dystopia about the dehumanisation in the electronic era, where we all have been unwittingly captivated already, beyond the latent prodromes: maybe our inquisition will not be managed by robots, nor we will grill them, but already now many people behave like drudge robots, programmed for the functions they are appointed to by governments that do not want us to be freethinkers, but manageable and impersonal slaves, instructed by the media promoting a mental transhumanism.
The dehumanisation born with the computer era is the subject of “Fluid Bodies” by Jeffu Warmouth, who chooses to mitigate the drama of electronic dystopia with a sarcastic sense of humour: the human being becomes a BLOB, the sprite of video-games from the 80s, enclosed into a world of pointless dares and dangers of which you can not see the aim.
Jody Zellen with “Time Jitters” represents the human society, with its agitations and its irreducible dissatisfaction, translating it into a hypothetical analytical vision of an information technology system, a precarious world characterised by the transiency where everything is computerised, catalogued and archived for future use, like a datum lacking a soul that is not worth to be experienced in the present.
The assemblage “Do I stand a chance?” by Jorge Mansilla, beside demonstrating a commitment for environmentalism, is an allegory of the pathetic uncertainty of human being lost in the chaos of the digital existence, like an ancient god by now incapable to perform prodigies because rapt in the amazement for the latest technological gadget.
In the sculpture “Cage of Thoughts” by Anne Cecile Surga you can recognise the relationship between the Being, who is living an endless present, and the society, requiring the Being to be positioned in time. If on one hand the sculpture can be interpreted as a metaphor of one’s own convictions that generating from the thought are going to create a cage where to segregate, on the other hand the bars made of cold and surgical steel can also be seen as if they were bursting from the outside into the head, thus representing the schemes, the precepts and the bounds imposed by a technocratic world, futuristic but also really contemporary.
The frenzy of the human being, who is craving to reach anything inconsiderately and go beyond oneself in the search for an intangible elsewhere, takes one’s own actions to an extreme level, getting close to the catastrophe, as you can see in the video “mountain-water-painting” by Christin Bolewski where the technological and analytical efforts of man do not exclude the predictable disasters, of which the mountains are majestic witnesses since ever.
Duygu Nazlı Akova in the video “Hive” represents the alienation of the personality. A society devoted to a blind and frenetic renovation is reported in its exasperating reiteration of activities ruled by economical needs, where the human being is downgraded to a mere executor of featureless gestures.
In the context of existential disquietude in front of the events, RoC promotes the self-determination of the Being with the expressionist abstraction of “Demain surement” (surely tomorrow) where the colours of a clear sky and of a foggy unknown are counterposed, while in “Le nécessaire Malentendu” (the necessary misunderstanding) a phantasmagorical appearance evokes that heart-rending vital struggle in the attempt to escape the eternal void.

The last group of works, sharing the comparison between past and future, is characterised by the search for a persistent balance and an all-encompassing cognition.
Detlef E. Aderhold emancipates himself from the illusion of time combining past, present and future in the oneness of hic et nunc. The elements belonging to personal and collective cultural baggages, while keeping the potentiality of uncertainty, emerge either evoking past epochs, and creating possible future scenarios.
The two paintings by Massimo Jose Monaco are representations of a past that can not be erased, and slowly but inexorably returns with the purpose to redeem the debt of the present: animals depicted in ancient Japanese style burst into the everyday life of forgetful and idle figures seated in their comfortable sofas.
Sao Fan Leong in her works encourages the searching for balance in the adimensionality of present and the illumination through the symbols and the teachings of the oriental Buddhist religion, that shares with other philosophies the concepts of nonexistence of time and of its cyclic nature, as in the Tao and the Ouroboros.
The cyclic repetition of the changes is an aspect of the personal research of Rachel Boyle, that is hinged on identity and genetics. The natural and uncontaminated element is symbolised by white roses that are laid down on faces with an astonished expression, as if they were trying to prevent further pronouncements whatsoever on what has been already set by nature.
The video by Oleg Chorny, although a specific condemnation of the Ukrainian conflicts in 2014, through a prolonged and intimate framing of a soil, underlines the almost therapeutic harmony of nature, with which you can detoxify yourself from the clamours of a mankind fallen pray of the folly, thanks to the exemplar sufficiency.
The music video “reaction” by Benna Gaean Maris, epilogue of a trilogy, concludes a philosophical reasoning visualised using sophisticated symbolisms, revealing finally the self-sufficiency and the serendipity of nature: the protagonists observe the course of events and time flowing, engaged in a metaphysical journey yet standing motionless.
David Theobald in “Jingle Bells” renders a disenchanted vision of the technology, that is always used as a lure to administer the stereotype of a luminous future. The remains of that future, seen once they have become part of the past, appear just as what they are: toys for bored children, banal gadgets, a heap of garbage over which nature always returns to prevail with his slowness.
The video “P100” by Claire Burke examines the recent past, represented by the technologies that have become obsolete in few decades since their birth, trying to revalue what has been already condemned to the oblivion, lingering on the lively fluidity and magical unpredictability of a technology that, albeit electronic, was much more close to the analogical nature of cosmos.
“Cowboy Romance” is a Baruchello like video cut-up with which Charles Woodman wants to counterweight the unbalance caused by the cinematographic fictions that are distorting the vision of the past, which is mystified in a reiterated violence for the purpose of making it compliant to the agitations of the futurist mind.
Nara Walker will complete this itinerary with the first representation of the performance “Hair Pull”, of which it can be foretold the correlation to the line as conceptual visualisation of time, since it has one direction beside the double function of connecting two points and of tracing a ridge between before and after.


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Alexander Barner Project

I do not like Alexander Barner’s artworks, and stating so I believe I am gratifying the artist: surely, he impresses extreme aggressiveness onto his strokes in order to shock the beholder, but not only.
At first sight in these drawings, so obsessively in the reiteration of determined subjects, we find the subversion and the fury arisen from the repression that is typical in European Expressionism, insomuch as to mention it with well known shapes like the face in “The scream” by Munch.
But beyond the visual phase, the subjects become the fundamental element of the message: spoilt visages, hostile eyes, resembling the aliens in “They live”, mouths shut with money, pentacle stars, skyscrapers and pyramids. A perfect X-ray picture of the society. That is it, for this I like Alexander Barner’s drawings.


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Starting from the archaic philosophical question on the meaning of life, up to the eternal “swan song” of the defeated, we can deduce from history that the obstinate reiteration of a thought in any case is always expression of an irrepressible absolute, unavoidable manifestation of frictions in the dualist cosmos.
A project continued with resolution, an inalterable and coherent constancy that does not leave you uninterested, even with a quite clear evolution of the strokes that led to an always more excited expressionist exasperation.
The represented reality is the mortifying conspiracy of a socio-economic system that segregates the defenceless individual soul constricting it into determined claustrophobic, rugged, cold and hostile spaces.


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OIKOS - ecointegralist art exhibition

After a transient moment of good hope, we live an epoch of prevailing huge economical upsets that determine heavy social unfairness, anguish and injustices in all the world. So more and more war conflicts are on the raise, justified with hypocritical and fabricated reasons, which only purpose is the ravaging of the resources, mainly of the lands that were the cradle of civilisation. Many populations come under unspeakable sufferings and massacres, finding salvation only in the getaway.

In such a context of humanitarian emergency, speaking of ecology may seem of secondary importance, but it is the very altered equilibrium between human being and environment where we find the cause of all: to one side, powerful and wealthy elites sustain a system of luxurious abuse of resources where squander reach unprecedented peaks and volumes, which is followed as a model by a middle class that, just to be no less, becomes always more poor or gets into debts; to the other side, always more numerous down-and-out masses find themselves to survive with, among and of the waste for need, suffering the obvious consequences. Thus there are who is living near to the nuclear plant where he works and who travels into the urban chaos breathing smog for work; there is who believe to be lucky to live near an airport or a cell phone repeater; there is who eats junk food, who buys near to expiry date groceries at a loss, who goes to soup kitchens, who waits for the humanitarian aids thrown with the parachute, who lives in the garbage dumps sorting waste to survive. At last, there is who blame misfortune when becomes ill physically or spiritually, and then he allows to be recycled like scrap by the same system that made them sick, producing more profits.

We have been teach that living into the dirt causes illnesses, but in the name of profit the human beings seem to have forgotten this principle; or well, to not incur into penalties they have learnt how to hide and dissimulate their own waste, making them always more invisible, odourless, intangible and devious, up to transforming them in ultra thin nano-dusts; otherwise making them alluring, even pleasant.

The production of a residue is always inherently an anti-economic and anti-ecological act.

In every field always more new artificial substances are invented, as much valuable as polluting: solid, gaseous, biological, nuclear or electromagnetic. The contamination is so much ubiquitous, pervading and creeping that it does spare no one.

From a naturalistic point of view, the technological discoveries usually considered products most of the times are not so much different from garbage: both pollute for their artificial nature.

Even many of the materials and processes with which artworks are made cause pollution, therefore also all this exhibition, but we can accept the extenuation that everybody is son of his epoch and to speak of change it is necessary to start from where we find ourselves, using what we have and in a way that can be understood by contemporaneity; moreover it is useful to display the body of evidence as much as the weapon used to commit the crime.

In that sense Video Art, although it depends too on not so eco-friendly technologies, it could be considered an ecological evolution of classic visual arts, because it dematerializes the artwork reducing it just to its most important essence, that is the message that it transmits by means of its virtual image, its incorporeal ghost, thus relieving the environment from the weight of new material products / garbage.

In the sphere of environmentalism, I consider that more than the lack of information, it is more detrimental the misinformation, which is extremely sought by the corporations interested just in the profits generated by their huge businesses that they have tagged with an ecology false label.
Sometimes also the artists are unknowingly part of that game, trusting the slogans that are passed off like mantras by mass media, hence I wanted to impress to the exhibition my personal opinion, carefully selecting the artworks in order to skim anything I consider an result of scams aimed to economical rather than ecological interests.
A glaring example is the waste recycling: instead of limiting the upstream production of waste, to one side they force recycling and to the other side they incite a mass distribution based on the prepackaged of retail products (e.g.: few ham slices are often on sale along with an equivalent mass of plastic) and on planned obsolescence (products / waste are not designed to last long). Therefore I have omitted one of the newest paragraphs of contemporary artistic expressions: Recycle Art with just an end in itself.
Also the theory of the supposed global warming caused by CO2, already inconsistent and vague in light of ampler independent studies, after the biased data scandal it had to change its name, becoming a more chancy climate change.

With the term ecointegralist I wanted to define a “fundamentalist” attitude strongly respectful of nature’s equilibriums. It is a hope for a change of mind on human lifestyles according to some of the precepts of ecosophy (philosophic ecology) related to the interaction between ourselves and the ecosystem, through a rapprochement with natural rhythms, circadian and seasonal cycles, a care for the fundamental principles of our existence, of out role and presence on the planet, that is the survival through our adaptation to environment and not vice versa.


Òikos, οἶκος: Greek «house, residence, family»

There is a certain culture portraying the environmentalist and ecological feeling as expression of a fanaticism; it is sarcastically nicknamed “ecotism”, with obvious assonance to egotism. They are partially right: ecology and respect for the environment really are egotism forms, or interest for one’s own safety: eco, from Greek òikos, means house, and our house is that sphere of finite extent called Earth. The one who make a mess of his own house is artless to say the least.

More and more people already have a high consciousness of the damages inflicted to the environment, and in their soul they passionately wish for a society respecting nature, but it seems that is not enough, in effect we assist to an always more frequent and insidious destruction and contamination of every aspect of the environment surrounding us. It is obvious that decisions are not made by citizenry.
Technology advances at exponential pace, creating every day new side effects to which most of the people are not prepared or are not even aware: nano-particles, biotechnologies, etcetera.
For the sake of immediate earnings, no one cares for the effect on the environment in the long term, and by now not even in the short term; in the best case, the expedients to contrast the health issues need decades to be assimilated by mass communications, so they become obsolete before they could ever be effective. To defend oneself, it is necessary to be well-informed and to understand the changes, and above all to catch the principle.

The artists can humbly offer to society their avant-garde perspicacity rising from their natural sensitivity and from the necessary observation skill, which sometimes eccentric and multifaceted spirit may lead to a wider vision of reality.

For that sake I have called artists having different languages, renowned or emerging, but all joined by a previous and disinterested personal engagement on environmental thematics, and that through their artworks have expressed themselves favouring the public denunciation of this set of problems.

Willing to win the resilience due to apathy and carelessness that prevent the action finalised to problem solving, this exhibition wants to sensitise everybody, favouring them to become conscious of realities too often omitted, concealed or marginalised into an elsewhere, and affirming that to preserve the environment where we live it is necessary also the resolute dissent combined to the free adoption of attitudes by the side of single individuals, and above all a change in the ethic of those who contribute to move those very socioeconomic gears that set the lifestyles of community.


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Environmental Art

We have the proofs the the sentiment of admiration and respect, even of anxious veneration for the splendour of natural environment has always been present in human culture since its dawning; that is revealed by the cave art of primitive people depicting an adventurous existence in which man was just a supporting actor in the ecosystem proscenium. It goes along mankind since millions years, enduring many anthropocentric declines, but always reviving in humanistic historic periods and through harmonious expressions: from Ancient Greece’s philosophy to the great landscape painters of the new American continent, from the phytotherapy of the Scuola Salernitana to the studies of Renaissance, from the lavishly decked tables painted by Flemish to the naturist movement.
However in the last 150 years, the studying of nature has generated also the industrial revolution, which result has been a sudden and unprecedented squandering of resources; in the last 50 years a new ecologist wave rose necessarily, the principle is always the same, the damage is the one already lamented by ancient Greeks, the solution is identical; anyway everything is as much amplified exponentially as spread in a fractal way.

Environmentalism updates itself to the contemporary needs and to the new manifestations of the anthropic ravaging, thus expressing through new artistic and conceptual movements.

Actually the expression of many environmental artists is into a more propositional phase, suggesting solutions and lifestyles rather than denouncing the mess. That is perhaps still premature: many artists have the capability to see ahead, beyond their own epoch, turning out to be sometimes not clear enough because too much far-sighted; instead society is much more pragmatic, since people are normally inclined to live confronting with the problems of the moment, rather than pursue futuristic attitudes or to disperse between different utopian hypotheses.

Thus I have considered more essential to continue the reporting of real facts with an exhibition to denounce once again the large and small disasters inflicted to the environment by human lifestyles, so shameful to be withhold, so common to be by now omitted and understood, as if all was normal.

But we must keep in mind that environmental art is a quite ambiguous conceptual ensemble, particularly in one of its most important forms, Land Art, since it includes essentially two positions even antithetical: the ones who use the planet as a medium, changing it to their liking, and the ones who instead denounce this abuse. The modification of the planet is the entrance toward the concept of geoengineering, a neologism indicating that megalomaniac intent aimed to the alteration of Earth and its atmosphere, forcing them to follow anthropic needs or caprices. That will is iconically expressed by the gigantic artwork “Spiral Jetty” conceived in 1970 by Robert Smithson that required the transfer of huge amounts of seashore land just for the sake of aesthetics.
Other exemplar alterations of nature are the artworks and performances by Antti Laitinen recently exhibited at the 55th Biennial of Venice; as in the series “Forest Square” featuring the manipulation of forest portions, which trees are reduced to small debris, subsequently evaluated, sorted by typology and then arranged within rectangles subdivided a la Mondrian.
Another land artist is Christo, often criticised by environmentalists for his gigantic interventions on nature, that he covers with miles of coloured textiles, because they are disrespectful and endanger underlying flora and fauna. In his “wrappings” I personally see also the concept of shroud, the cloth used to wrap the corpses.
In most cases environmental art of the manipulative kind has the characteristics of Pop Art: it deals more with aesthetics and frivolity than concept and engagement.

On the contrary, art in defence of environment is necessarily alarmist, sometimes permeated by a brutal atmosphere of seriousness and pain that may be confused with pessimism, thus turning out irksome, while no behaviour is more pessimist than unwillingness to see the problems.
The large sized installation “Construction Materials of the Spanish Pavilion” by Lara Almarcegui gives a good picture of the brutality that can be reached by environmental art exposés, simply bringing to the eyes of the public some enormous and raw piles of debris coming from the demolition of industrial factories ruining the Venetian Lagoon.
Then, in the trunks of the artwork “Kreupelhout” by Berlinde De Bruyckere, dedicated to the paintings of Saint Sebastian, we can see a sense of pain expressed by bandages and ligatures that make it to resemble a tortured human body.
But there are also artists speaking of the relation with environment that use a more serene and sarcastic language, like Wim Delvoye, notorious firstly for the installation “Cloaca”, a terrible industrial machinery reproducing the working principles of the human digestive system that turns the inserted aliments into intestinal waste, who has conceived the series “Deft Cabinet”, representing showcases with blades for brush cutters made of Delftware; or Piero Gilardi with his Tappeto Natura “Dopo l’incendio”.
Joseph Beuys, one of the most fundamental environmentalist artists, instead gives to his artworks a tone in balance between denunciation and attitude, with a sense of unbiased austerity but also of solemn serenity.
The installation “La scorta” by Gianfranco Baruchello can be interpreted as absolutely propositional and as a denunciation of the squandering, he simply combines two antagonist symbols: the bicycle as an ecology respecting symbol and the system power represented by the big deployment of forces defending it, to which we have unfortunately become accustomed.
This artwork is also metaphorically symbolising the split between personal interests and longings juxtaposed to the interests for environment and society, of which we should feel to be part.


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DIOYDEA - Conspazioranea

I knew Dioydea in the times when she compiled her curriculum-flipper or pinball, needed to rearrange the chaos of vicissitudes into a form intelligible to the public. Coherently, she faced that chaos of existence with adamancy until today, while artworks are scrutinized for a concise anthological exam to which the parallelism with the pinball is very apt.

However her artistic expression is not a game, but a profound grammatical, logical, illogical, analysis, jeering criticism of human knowledge, because most of the times, paradoxically, we do not really know that, not even scientifically.

To deeply know the wholeness of her expression implies to wish no peace, to turn fast toward everything and come back; it is a pretence, because it is likewise a pretence to analyse and to re-elaborate without rest any aspect of the wholeness that we face; however, it is at last the spur to emancipate ourselves from habits, rescuing the mind from the unavoidable necrosis caused by the stagnant thought.

This exhibition tries to place those few but meaningful pieces from the jigsaw puzzle of that incognizable knowledge, like many small windows opened on the scenery of disillusion, otherwise concealed behind the wall of preconceptions and of certainties.


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BENNA - europawns
21-29 April 2012
http://europawns.has.it

The nineteen caustic artworks of the recent series “europawns” make the body of this experimental show: a telematic exhibition with uncensored real-time chat-vernissage.
When the sensorialism of materials is relevant, the artworks should always be seen in the reality. Anyway, in cases like this, the black on white neatness of the prints from digital graphics makes it possible an adequate use even on the screen.

The artworks of this series keenly deal with the recent events of the Europeanism supporting socio-economic panorama, starting from the Italic territory and arriving to the global context that changes and bustles turbulently. For this reason these artworks are ephemeral: they will become soon obsolete as the politics’ figurants, which are alternating in the parliaments of the self-styled international class of politics. Or perhaps they will become totemic milestones of a bad story not to forget.
The events are so fast that there is no time to find the right words on these arguments or to realize a well structured exhibition before the panorama had already changed: it is necessary to act, offering visibility to the engaged artists. And, what is more adequate than an exhibition that can be seen in all the world, wherever there is an internet access?

This is not the time to show objects of art for sale, indeed it would be good to open the speech, to expose one’s own point of view. Time passes by, the pawns on the European chessboard are changing, but the game is always as before, the Agenda is always the same. Horrible heads fall down, but considering them just incompetent would be an illusion, and under even more abominable ones are rising, all theatrical sacrificial victims by Superior Order.
It is lamented the overruling of national governments, but it is not understood that the national governments had already prepared this way overruling the people of their rights, of the control on who and how to govern, and even of the decision for themselves, to the point that by now the citizen would be pleased with just a right whatsoever, as long as seen on television. Indeed people always decided nothing, they were just lead to believe it.

The beloved, old and pointless satire never solved people’s problems, indeed, it has aggravated them, because it is just an escape-valve for the constriction, to free the rage with a laughter. The artworks of the “europawns” series may even seem just satirical, but they prove glacial lucidity and unbiased acrimony in judging the decrepit and corrupted incivility of Homo venalicus. More than raising a smile, they lead to think, and perhaps they make aware or raise the wish to deepen by exchanging informations; this is the intent that the show purposes.

The exhibition event is virtually sited in Brussels, which time zone (GMT +1) has been adopted as reference for the opening time of the vernissage.


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Ego In Spectra
17-23 June 2011
Double solo exhibition

The Art of self observation
Elle - Sara Manotti

Since the dawn of the modern era, the tendency toward the self observation, toward the introspection, has progressively made its way among the artists, and by reflection the whole society. This notion would be enough to make people declaring they still not understand contemporary Art to change their mind. Despite this, with the attainment of a superior crypticism, the interpretation of the expressive contents has become necessary.

Many contemporary artists manifest themselves with a personal intimist language, or they describe a self-referential imaginary. In some cases this may be due to the necessity to sublimate passions and uneasiness, and in other to the difficulty to represent extremely deep, thin, abstract or metaphysical feelings.
In the first case, the introspection (the analytical course that passes through self) represents the necessary and one only way to avoid intolerable other options, the halt caused by the impossibility to go on, the contemplation of the past, the searching backward along the humanity's journey for that deviation from which we arrived to the actual condition. A stepping back that eventually will take to the ancestral origins.
And in those same origins there are the archetypes of the cryptic expression, which, in the second case, constitutes the predominant and peculiar characteristic of this Art that always originates in the arduous attempt to explain the intangible.

This introspective journey through Art starts in the Renaissance, thanks to the change caused by the artists of these times who redeemed the value of their own intellectual individuality, which became real in the first self-portraits in Art's history, like the ones of Jean Fouquet and Albrecht Dürer. The Renaissance is that period in which the modern Artist was born, which emancipated itself from the subdued position of workman, labourer or artisan, bringing its own individuality to a worthy higher consideration.
The analysis of its own exterior image has then evolved in that of the human mind and of the inner life, both physical and psychic: from the anatomical studies of Leonardo da Vinci to the sculptures by Gunther von Hagens, from the oneiric symbology of the paintings by Hieronymus Bosch to the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud.
Since Renaissance till today, the representation of the deep and the unfathomable has been the strong element of many artistic movements: the Metaphysical Art of De Chirico, the Surrealism of Dalì, the Symbolism of Moreau, the Blake's one, the Oneirism, and obviously the Expressionism, founded on the interpretation of reality through the filter of one's own inner life, of which artists like Kubin and Munch are masters. This journey reaches its apex in movements of strong crypticism like the Abstract Surrealism, the Abstractism, the Minimalism of Jean Arp, arriving up to, paradoxically, the extreme antithesis, for example as in the annihilation of any individual expression of the Pittura Analitica.

Surely history has been always marked by horrible and blameworthy events, and the search for introspection provides, besides the soothing for the wounds, also an escape-valve for the spirit. That's why contemporary Art is so permeated by this necessary analysis of the self and the human being: it is a research aimed to understand and to solve the causes that lead to the sufferings of mankind.
And thanks to the diverse approaches with which the contemporary artists face this research, no path is omitted.
There is who is devoted to the introspective analysis of self: the first performances about the interaction with space by Bruce Nauman and those about human interaction by Marina Abramović; the insertion of her own image into the common imaginary done by Cindy Sherman and the manifestation of the own inner imaginary of Francesca Woodman; the evanescent serial self-portraits by Roman Opalka and the representation of the personal subconscious of Matthew Barney.
Others are devoted to this research exploring the sensorial reality and the tangible essence of the human being: the upsetting photographic allegories by Joel-Peter Witkin; the radiographic chimeras of Benedetta Bonichi; the overturning of the concept of Vanitas that Damien Hirst proposed with the famous skull covered with diamonds.
Others else, staying between the physical observation and psychic expression, represent the human mind perceiving those thin signals with which it shows in the sensorial reality: the misty portraits by Gerhard Richter; the algid realism with which Rineke Dijkstra represents the human essence; the sarcastic sensibility with which Ruth Gwily succeeds in describing the uneasiness; the immanent condemnation of the human beings painted by Guy Denning.

Elle has participated in several collective and solo exhibitions in the Tigullio, Merano, Rome and United States of America. Prizes: American Red Cross Saturno Foundation. Studies: Istituto Statale d'Arte of Chiavari, Accademia di Belle Arti of Genoa. The thematics of her paintings are devoted to the remembrance and to the world of human history. The decay is always present, as if it had to remember the caducity of everything is alive and that, anyway, will be inherited to the posterity as experience.

Sara Manotti takes advantage of photography to represent the dense pathos that springs from her imaginary. She took part in several collective photographic exhibitions in the Tigullio and in contemporary Art exhibitions in Zoagli, Genoa and Milan organized curated by Jizaino. Studies: Istituto Statale d'Arte of Chiavari, DAMS of Bologna and Giuliana Traverso's school of photography in Genoa.


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RAWBROW
13-19 May 2011
Double solo exhibition
Abramo ‘Tepes’ Montini - Mary

The inexplicable outline of Pop Culture

Highbrow, Lowbrow... Middlebrow. Is Art a matter of eyebrow?

The lowbrow term has been used by the Seattle's gallerist Kirsten Anderson in order to give a name to that movement, until then indefinite, of artists considered of low profile by the art system. The term was coined in opposition to highbrow, that metaphorically defines something of highly cultural profile (from the snobbery way to raise an eyebrow, weighing one's own culture over the others).
Thus Lowbrow Art defines that underground artistic movement of popular descent, little interested to an intellectual involvement with the high culture or the fine arts, and which rather finds its own origins in the culture of comic strips, Punk, Street and Graffiti Art, often borrowing the subjects which are often very hard.
We are talking about a populist movement enumerating a large number of practisers and a wide and hardly catalogable production. Maybe for these reasons, Lowbrow Art is not taken in good consideration by the art system and the critics, who have to do with outsider artists characterized by the multiform and uncontrollable vulgarization of the expressive languages, which, being extraneous to the academic world, result hardly understandable.
But, may it exist an Art which is “in” or “out”? Creating an artistic apartheid, it would approve the idea that Art must be subdued to restricting parameters, either technical skill or academic coherence. It is not so: Art is in primis a way to communicate feelings and concepts that could not be expressed otherwise; the manner and the technique are just of secondary importance.
On the other hand, also the Lowbrow movement does not like the hegemony of critics and art system dominated by marketing logics.
Nevertheless, few years after the birth of Lowbrow, to be considered artists of low cultural profile became undesirable to some, therefore the movement evolved in the more qualifying Pop Surrealism.

Although interchangeable with Lowbrow, Pop Surrealism is sometimes visually sweetened and gentle, therefore more proper for a vast public in comparison to the sometimes scabrous subjects of the first, anyway preserving the eccentric thematics of it, which are represented with a pompous imaginary that recalls Gothic or Victorian style. Even technical skill gets greater attention in comparison to Lowbrow, up to assume the varnished clearness of the illustration, but always preserving a naïve appearance, often representing super deformed or boterian figures.
The style and the subjects of Pop Surrealism are often conformed to an almost monolithic collective mannerism that makes the artists adopting it sometimes very similar.

A certain degree of mannerism is the evidence of a transitory phenomenon tied to the fashion of an epoch, this is to say, to a contemporary stylistic palette. But rising upon the manner's appearance and looking at the contents in a more historicized and general context, we can ascertain the evidence of a fact: what the contemporary fashion before calls it Lowbrow and then Pop Surrealism is always that same Art of populist and naïf kind that exists since ever and with time changes only its shape. In the XIX century it was the Art Naïve of Camille Bombois and Antonio Ligabue, then it was the Primitive Art of Alfred Wallis, the Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet and the Raw Art, the Outsider Art, the Graffiti Art and the Hip-Hop culture of Basquiat and Banksy; all variations of the great revolution celebrated by the Pop Art, or Popular Art. It is that one that made its way on its own legs, because it is promoted by critics and the art system only when it is already acclaimed; that one wrongly considered outsider, because universal and accessible.

Mary, self-taught Artist, uses the visual syntaxes typical of Naïf and of Expressionism, she has a spontaneous personality, strengthened by the culture of Nature that she engraves in her paintings together with a sensibility acquired with the individual experiences, positive or negative that they may have been: in the paintings are living subjects from an imaginary which is personal as much as intercultural and unexpectedly actual, expressed with lines and colours that return up to certain juvenile manners typical of Street Art and Hip-Hop culture. Besides the vibrating and aesthetical impact free from conventions, a parallel cultural and spiritual dimension is found, a dreamed vision of the reality that can be synthesized in a word: idyll.

Also Abramo 'Tepes' Montini is a self-taught Artist. His expression, even overlapping to the stylistic elements and the kitsch taste proper of Pop Surrealism, has an unmistakable Dark Pop style: the subjects are slight and in the meantime distressing, almost nightmares, with that surreal aura typical of dreams. His paintings seem to come upon in the dark of sleep, originating from the depths of the conscience; they bring afloat some fragments, like finds submerged and forgotten in the abyss of psyche. These disquieting finds do not emerge for the simple purpose to disturb the observer, and not even for an apotropaic purpose; on the contrary because they are the human anguishes that the dualist society tries to bury under a blanket of hypocrisy and do-goodism. They set the observer in front of a magic mirror that reflects the most concealed and denied recesses of the soul.


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Benna - Critical Mess
22-28 April 2011
Solo exhibition

Multiplicity and global context

The title is a wordplay between the locution critical mass, term used in sociology to define the critical point beyond which an event becomes uncontrollable, and the word mess.

Human society is the basic matter that constitutes the artworks of this exhibition; beyond the surface of appearance, they face very profound thematics starting from an intimate philosophic base. Images and concepts try to return intellectual harmony to a society which reveals itself as deeply unbalanced, cause it's founded on the culture of coercion and mystification. The human being is victim or witness of the continuous leaking of tribulations, coming from the dripping of events that generate from prevarications and injustices of which he is the same cause.

Mess also meant as food ration; and in the social tissue also food has its important role. Benna often faces with the topic of nutrition, both in its socio-economical implications of panem et circenses and in the shifting from its metaphysical value to a reduction to mere simulacrum.

Artist of eclectic manifestation, Benna's expression utilizes video, photography, painting, digital graphics, plastic art, sculpting, poetry, sound; not necessarily limiting to these disciplines.

His artworks sometimes coexist over diverse media, for example in form of video and photographs. This is a tendency that is going to gain more attention in the contemporary Art, also for the need to objectify those forms of Art which are more ephemeral or experimental; as an example, the performances of Vanessa Beecroft, that become tangible in the form of photographs or videos.
The interdisciplinary ubiquity in the development of a subject is sometimes also due to the necessity of varying or multiply the offer to satisfy a public more and more bigger and diversified; we can ascertain this behaviour in the projects of artists like Jeff Koons, who realized his famous inflatables both as paintings and as sculptures of diverse materials, as chromed steel or vinyl.
The multiplicity is a factor that nowadays has become almost necessary: the artworks are going to produced in series or in multiples, in a number more or less limited, making them available to a larger number of people that otherwise would be excluded. In fact, as the notorious critic Philippe Daverio underlined in an interview: “that century [the XVII, NdT] the artists were three hundreds, the people interested of art one hundred twenty thousands; today the people interested of art are probably three millions, then instead of one and a half or three hundreds artists we should have the courage to accept that we have three or six thousands of them.”
Or, lacking artists who can rouse an interest in people, multiply the artworks of the most wanted ones.

The expressive and technical eclecticism, on another side, is opposed to that presumed requisite of the market which prefers artists with a high recognizability. This presupposition is unfounded, as this is demonstrated by eclectic artists that have become very famous even without a strongly uniform and visually characterized artistic expression; like the controversial Damien Hirst, who indeed, dissimilarly to others, does not take part in the realization of his own artworks, commissioning them to others.
Although eclecticism, since Renaissance up to now, is gaining attention as a prerogative associated to creative genius, hence as a desirable artistic skill, it is not yet easy to find artists who can nimbly manage the different techniques. In the ancient times, where a technical specialization with a servile and working vocation was dominating, the most versatile artists, as the great geniuses Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, were more likely unique than rare. In the modern epoch, the gushing creativity of great artists like Andy Warhol and Bruno Munari, together with the disorienting conceptual ductility of personages like Marcel Duchamp, have given an impulse to the multidisciplinary generations of today: from Bruce Nauman to Michelangelo Pistoletto, from Gottfried Helnwein to David Lynch.

In this exhibition, just a small part of the artworks of Benna are taken under consideration.
This selection, although keeping rooted eclectic features, is limited to static visual arts, as a discussion including also video, plastic and sound art, would be too complex.
Instead, as the exhibition's title elliptically expresses, the focus has been put on the conceptual contents of global pertinence, inherent to the contemporary human condition dominated by the instability which is caused by big stirrings and by the intercultural meeting/collision, at the same time exhibiting artworks that try to embank that induction of a subtle indetermination inside the cognitive intimacy of the individual.


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DEDALO
Collective exhibition of contemporary Art
Andrea Corbetta - Anna Copello - Benna - Davide Loi - Elle
13-29 September 2007

The daedalic maze can be considered a metaphor of the human existence: each decision we make is like to turn the corner of the cosmic unknown, of which we know only the dilemmas that we encounter in the places and on the needs of the moment; because the road that we can follow is always only one.

This metaphor of the maze is valid today more than in the past: contemporary mankind faces and challenges the Cosmos with science thinking to be at one step to the victory, but it is like a blind man who makes little steps gropingly, and go forward with repetitive attempts, as much improvident as done by chance.

Surely the will is a good thing: it is the necessary ingredient to evolve, but who is gifted with it does not have to think it is useful only for our human dimension, that is not the universal purpose in the name of which to declare a post-humanist and anthropocentric war against the Cosmos.
Yes, because we’re talking of a war, since to impose oneself means to do it in detriment of something else; and the revenge of the opponent is the consequence. And as it happens in any war, turbulent periods of fighting are succeeding, and of illusion of victory, and of desperation. And soon or later, as in any war, one can win.
Or lose.

Invitation to the pondering

As it is already stated in the introductory text, surely the will is necessary to evolve, but the humankind withdraws in itself thinking that it serves only to a human still dimension, declaring a post-humanist and anthropocentric war against the Cosmos.

To declare a war is always a vain thing, since everything changes; and if one chooses to dare the Cosmos, then one will have to fight with the change, and so much science becomes useless at every move.

The modern man attacks furiously in the struggle to prevail on the Cosmos, becoming obstinate more and more; in this battle the men enlist themselves in the batteries of the modern scientific research, trying the path of the brute force, of the systematic empiricism, ending up resembling to small and unaware components of abnormal electronic calculators.

The individual must not lose his characterizing qualities: the conscience and the spirituality, from which the ability to understand the Cosmos can spring, and therefore to know how to foresee the future, and above all to accept it.

Because the humankind is nothing but a part of the Cosmos, and to fight against the Cosmos means to fight also against oneself. One could also just remember as the humankind, with its rashness, in a little more of one hundred years, has managed to rage on the environment where it lives too, poisoning the source of its own life.

One have to pose the question if the Good were so important, when it is just for a part of the whole.
Who should win the fight? A part or the whole?

Anna Copello

In the first wing of the exhibition we find Anna Copello, that since when she was a child learned the photographic Art from her grandfather Andrea and from her father Aldo. Anna is recently carrying out an anthropological research, with an interest on habit and landscape in various cultures.

There are two selections of photographic prints: one of the two proposes some prints taken from the series "Il sentiero del mondo" (The path of the world) and it represents situations of poverty; some of these photos have appeared in various exhibitions and publications.
These subjects are pervaded of that disquietude which is a characteristic of the desperation, that is often originated from the lack of horizons caused by the intangible boundaries of the society that trap the being.

The second selection proposes some experimental works entitled for the occasion "Il mondo di Dedalo" (The world of Dedalo), of which we can see an example to the side.

Andrea Corbetta

In the next section we find the assemblages of Arte Povera by Andrea Corbetta.

Among the various artworks there is an enormous gecko that is grasped to the wall, still, as a bundle of bionic fibres ready to jerk and to attack the prey.

These are some of the mechanical beasts of the series "Mechanimals".
They are like simulacra of a Nature extinct by now, robotic golems, motionless but ready to animate.
The cloning, the genetics, the robotics and all the sciences in the vanguard are today the point of ethical dilemmas, that are present however for a long time since the most ancient mythology.
What does drive us to give life to new creatures? In order to use them? Or perhaps to leave them to destroy us?

Benna

Continuing the visit we encounter some artworks of Benna realized with different techniques, as one could expect from the eclectic Artist.
The work that firstly attracts the attention is an audio installation to be listened, in a distorted way, through an old telephone handset. It is entitled "Evergreen".
"Evergreen" speaks (or perhaps we could say that it sings) about a frail humankind, that disperses like a singing in the atmosphere of an evergreen planet.

Just beside we find an oil painting on canvas entitled "Magic mirror" where it is depicted a skyscraper of glass on which the face of an old man is reflected.
Relating the title of the painting with the sad face imprisoned in the surface, we can clearly deduce the reference to the renown genius of the fables, who in this case desolately stares at us.
Then we encounter three large photographic elaborations belonging to the series entitled "Food patterns"; in them some very common fruits are represented: an apple, a banana and a kiwifruit, that however after a closer examination they reveal to be constituted by a dense weft of coloured small dots, apart the label over them (see the detail in the picture at the side). Moreover on each artwork a bar code is applied, which contains some statistic data of the fruit in question.
Finally there is the polyptych of photographic elaborations entitled "Decrypted signs". With this artwork Benna invites to ponder on the consequences that can originate from the defection of one's responsibility in favour of a blind observance for the dogmas and the schematisms. The feature that the human being have to pursue is that of being ratiocinating, of being able to determine his own path with no need to depend on absolutist or generic directives.
The aesthetics and the structure of these photographs transform those street signals in obsessive and unquestionable presences: for the casual way with which the frames are composed, for the repetition of some elements, and obviously for the grievously surreal atmosphere, like that of a nightmare. The inscriptions bring to mind the ones in the film "They live" by John Carpenter.
The infrared photography is usually used for portraits and landscapes. But in "Decrypted signs" it does not find a proper application of that kind, but it makes use of the surreal atmosphere for the purpose to place the artwork, and consequently also the beholder, in an extraneous dimension, where it is possible to conceive the reality with other sensorial and metaphysical abilities. For this purpose the hue of the photographs is not modified after the pictures have been taken; that is a typical modification done most of the times with this kind of photographs. Instead modifications are done on the inscriptions using photo-retouch techniques.

Elle

The artworks by Elle are arranged in a route that unfolds in five parts that express the progressive sublimation of the mental degeneration.
The polyptych route is composed by four paintings, in mixed technique as it is used by the Artist, realized on canvas and a small stele realized with an ancient piece of wood.
The titles, ordered following the established route, are: "Degenerazione (paranoia)", "Ricerca (xyz)", "Scoperta (chiodo fisso)", "Evoluzione (choreus)" ed "Evoluzione (ritorno a casa)", ("Degeneration (paranoia)", "Research (xyz)", "Discovery (fixed idea), "Evolution (choreus)" and "Evolution (return to home)").

Elle describes to us the use she makes of visually decayed, spoilt and ancient materials, saying that "the decaying is always present in her artworks, as to remind the frailty of every living thing and that, however, it will remain to the posterity as experience"; in the picture below there is a detail that shows the use of these materials.


Davide Loi

We arrive finally to the room dedicated to Davide Loi, an Artist born in Turin, and active since some years in Liguria.

Loi stands out for the great painting skill, due to the study of the great classical Masters, particularly the Flemish school.
But his paintings go beyond the technique: they show a particular intellectual sensibility, that is expressed through subjects supported by complementary hints that invite us to search for the hidden meanings of his works. The artworks by Loi are simple enigmatic situations that when they are revealed, they become pearls that are as small as amazing.

Loi have proposed to Dedalo the following artworks, all realized in oil on canvas of medium and large sizes:
Noche, quiero decirte una cosa" ("Night, i would say to you one thing"), "Concreta ipotesi di gioia" (Real hypothesis of joy), "Incertezza assoluta" (absolute uncertainty), the triptych "Rain" and "Una goccia di splendore" (A drop of splendour).
These artworks offer an estranging vision of the daily normality that is invaded by metaphysical symbols, that are tangible thoughts extracted by the meander of the psyche.

Loi after the artistic high school has begun to work as restorer at the studio of Alina Pastorini.
Successively he has collaborated with the scenographer Angelo Cucchi for several theatrical events and expositions in Turin. Besides the activity of painter he is also devoted to graphics and illustration, and he has realized drawings for the publishing of didactic books for children.



The fib of Mark Rothko
When a Jew adopts a thought of Adolf Hitler

Last month i have visited the great anthological exposition on Mark Rothko, closed on 6 January 2008 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (Italy). Today, 25 February, anniversary of the death of the painter, i found myself writing a consideration that i had when i was standing in front of his artworks and that it has returned in my mind reading again the pamphlet.

This painter is mainly known for his numerous abstract paintings of simple rectangles or fields in which the representation is totally absent.
My consideration concerns exactly these paintings of the abstract period.

Approximately in the first fifteen years of his career as a painter, Rothko has had a stylistic evolution that has led him to a progression from the expressionism, to the symbolism, to the surrealism. Then, between 1945 and 1947, its painting has a rapid change, eliminating any element of representation to definitely become abstract.

That abstractionism will be a constant for the remaining twenty and more years of his life.

In the same time of this breakup with the representative Art, Rothko also decides to paint his abstract paintings on canvases of large and very large size.

The exposition in Rome offered a very complete panorama of this evolutionary process of Rothko, allowing to quantify the dimensions of this stylistic progression.
The show occupied up to seven of the big halls of the ground floor located around the porch.
Well: the first fifteen years of his painting evolution exhausted itself in the first two halls, while the rest of the abstract production occupied the other five.

Apart the first two halls and the explanatory texts, the rest of the show could be visited in two minutes, at a fast pace, since the abstract artworks by Rothko are all similar.

Obviously on the Abstract Art of Rothko several critique essays do exist, in this case perhaps extremely wordy, that propose technical virtuosities or cravings of the painter as justifications of his crystallization of the contents, his obsession for a sole subject.

Personally I do not appreciate the serial production, the reiteration of a subject, unless it persists just for a limited period or is justified by a conceptual reason; anyway I cannot conceive how a painter can keep on painting exclusively the same thing for over twenty years. To me such a behaviour is mere commercial opportunism.
Or the passive reiteration could be caused by an intellectual exhaustion or by a pathological apathy that has become desperation.
One could also consider that Rothko, some years before this change of expression, suffered of depression after a divorce, but exactly in 1945 he married again and had a happy marriage. In any case the desperation and the self-pity are not compatible with genius. The genius of an Artist can be seen in his multi-faceted personality, in the eclecticism, in his capacity to adapt himself to the changes of the world, in expressing his own intellectual or spiritual evolution, revealing his own vitality, his own wish to oppose even to the troubles of life.

Rothko was of Jewish Russian family: still a child he saw to the violent retaliations of the Cossacks against the Jews, to the point that somebody wants to relate the paintings with rectangles to the vision of the mass graves, scenes of several slaughters, that shocked him when he was a child.
Anyway a weird coincidence reminds me that the reality is not so simple, but is a complex mixture composed by many things: revenge, envy, contamination and respect, besides hate and exorcism.

Adolf Hitler, adopting a thought of the Minister of National Socialist Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, said:

"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it."

Exactly starting in the period in which the second world war ended, Rothko began to realize big paintings, of extremely simple subjects and in an absolutely repetitive way.

Today Rothko is one of the highly rated painters: in 2007 one of his paintings has been purchased at Sotheby's New York for nearly 73 millions of dollars. That is a painting of 1950 entitled "White center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)"; it is the third one in the upper row of the previous picture.

Anyway this assiduous repetition of coloured rectangles had a sort of evolution: toward the last years of life of the painter, the colours became darker and less gaudy, with more and more preference for greys and blacks.

In 1969 Marcus Rothkowitz committed suicide at the age of 66 cutting his veins of both arms with a razor.

Jokingly we could even find an interpretation to his abstract artworks: they could be the revelation of his states of mind through the use of the colours; as if they were litmus papers, to which these paintings curiously resemble.

And we could even say that sometimes the fibs become unbearable and they lead to a blind alley.


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Die andere Seite
Deep considerations on the novel by Alfred Kubin

Preface

Alfred Kubin, besides to have been a famous expressionist engraver, he have been also a writer; "Die Andere Seite" (The Other Side) is his first and most important literary work, that he wrote in just twelve weeks after the death of his father to sublimate the shock of the loss that had brought him to a psychological jam. In the weeks following the drafting, Kubin provided the book with over fifty drawings.

The following article is a deep analysis of the story, a careful examination of its meaning, therefore you are warned that it would spoil the surprise; however it may help who have already read the book to deepen its understanding, or to serve as a guide to whom that want to read it in a reasoned way, and obviously to arouse the curiosity in those people who did not know it.

The book can be read at different levels: as simple entertainment during a relaxing vacation, allowing oneself to be fascinated by that ancient taste for narrative excited by episodes of a mild and naïf horror, which remembers that aura of immanent curse that preceded the apparitions of that ghosts, as diaphanous as merciless, described in the nineteenth-century Gothic stories of James.
Or at a psychoanalytic level, taking those metaphors and symbologies enriching the book; up to a deeper examination of the metaphysical and philosophical meanings, that will be possible to better appreciate by deeply knowing the artistic work of Kubin (to this purpose i invite you to read also the file cards of some artworks of him that are included in the Collection at this room).

Introduction

The story talks about an elderly artist of Munich who is invited with his wife to become a citizen of Pearl, which is the capital city of a mysterious new kingdom founded in the far east: the Dream Realm.
The invitation is coming from an old companion of his youth, Claus Patera, Ruler of this kingdom, who became immensely rich thanks to an unexpected inheritance. The invitation comes together with a generous money reward and the guarantee to live in a country that aspires to an utopistic perfection, a promised land for worthy people.
But in order to enter the Dream Realm a particular requisite do exists: nobody can bring with himself brand-new objects that belongs to epochs after the second half of the XIX century, because Patera does not like those tricky things of the modernity; all of what is found in his Realm, even the houses, have been carefully selected around the world and transported in the capital following his personal taste for things that are second-hand and belonging to the past.

The protagonist, accepting the invitation, will be progressively overwhelmed into a psychic and physical odyssey: early during the travel he will be obsessed by creepy bad premonitions, and his stay, disappointing since the beginning, will become a spiral of madness without escape, up to reach the final hecatomb, when the Dream Realm collapses in a earthly and spiritual apocalypse in surreal and magical shades.
This apocalyptic epilogue is caused by a quarrelsome American, the multimillionaire Hercules Bell, who comes in the Dream Realm even not having been ever invited, with the intentional aim to foment a revolt.
To the protagonist, who has a sickly wife, it has been assured that the climate of Pearl is absolutely mild and constant all the year, therefore healthy and relaxing; but at their arrival they discover instead that the city of Pearl is perpetually dimmed by a blanket of clouds of inexplicable origin, and therefore it is immersed in a ghostly and depressing dullness, where the sun is a pale remembrance.

Considerations

The story is very evocative, as one could expect from an illustrator Artist like Kubin: he succeeds to arouse in the mind of the reader the visualization of complex scenes, in detail but concisely.
Who already knows the etchings and the other artworks of Kubin, will find them again one by one in the concepts and the scenes described in this book.

Kubin, as young as thirty-one, seems wanting to pour all his experience in this book, exposing all the aspects of his intellect, all of what presumably belongs to a life by now completed and that it has achieved its own philosophical considerations in a definitive way; surely in the past times the life of a person matured soon and in a quite resolute way, certainly not as in the contemporary epoch where the immaturity and the uncertainty of the Becoming are eternal companions of life.

The Realm where the protagonist happens to be is a decaying world; at the beginning it seems like a rather eccentric place, certainly suitable for an artist, but slowly it turns out a Dante's Hell where the very same favourers and conniving people do perish for their vices and errors.
The bad of this kingdom is the stillness, the unwillingness to change or to evolve, the immobilism caused by the necessity to maintain one's own miserable or great advantages; in other words: greed, opportunism and sloth.

The inhabitants of Pearl are essentially vicious or weak-minded, they have been deliberately selected by the Ruler for those characteristics. "Deformed" people, imperfect, grotesque, as initially described by the protagonist at his arrival in Pearl: paranoids, neurasthenic men, hysterical women, hazard players, hyper-religious subjects, counterfeiters, alcohol addicted people and even wanted murderers; or physically abnormal: enormous goitres, cluster noses, gigantic hunches.

The people selected to become citizens of the Dream Realm are persuaded thanks to great money rewards lavished by the Sovereign Patera that possesses incalculable wealths, the same to which Bell, the American, will be interested.
Whoever would try to meet the Ruler, even just to thank him, will face a wall made of bureaucracy, impossible requisites, false promises and also veiled threats. Also, who would try to resolutely investigate on the origin of so much magnanimity, will got lost inside the daedalic and inexpugnable Palace of Patera, living a surreal and terrible experience.

Money is the bait that attracts people inside a trap, a vicious circle that slowly leads them to the immobilism and the conservatism; just like it happens in the reality, where, to maintain one's own status in the context of the unstable speculative system manipulated by the powerful, people tend to grasp more and more at their own certainties represented by the properties.

During the story some promises of the protagonist to deepen certain important matters are not kept, as for instance the investigation on the presence of a secret freemasonry, for the happening of new and serious contingencies; this gives to the reader the impression that things does not always go as one would them to be and one needs to conform to the changing of the events. A lot of details remain a mystery, like the autochtonous people with blue eyes, the homicide of a messenger of Bell that would have driven the Russian divisions in the occupation of Pearl, or the origin of the powers of Patera.

One of the mysterious customs of the inhabitants of Pearl is the "great spell of the clock": an eccentric rite that the inhabitants are impatient to celebrate daily without a true knowledge of the reason why it is so necessary and gratifying.
The rite consists in entering one after the other, at an appointed hour, inside a clock tower, where in the inside there are some enigmatic symbols over which a stream of water flows and you can hear the usual ticking of the clock. The people prolong as much as possible the stay inside the tower, although the other ones urge to enter, then they say a phrase of religious prostration and they exit evidently satisfied.
The rite is an evident metaphor of the frenzy for "tempus fugit" (time is running) or of the "panta rei" (everything flows), that however in the dull life of Pearl it seems reduced to a simple rite deprived of any consequence for the reality.

Anyway in the Dream Realm the flowing of time time has a positive value: in another episode the protagonist has a mystical meeting with the Sovereign during which an unbelievable fact happens: for an instant the time stops and men and animals of the Realm stand still as wood statues; in this episode the Ruler promises to help the severely sick wife of the protagonist, but, after a sudden and apparent improvement, she dies in a short time.
This is to mean that the help does not consist in changing what had been decided, but just in the acceleration of the events in order to end the sufferings as soon as possible. The rite of the clock have to be seen from this point of view.

The novel also has a socio-political value, other than metaphysical: in it there are clearly facing the immobilism of well rooted European empires, represented by the Dream Realm and his mystical Sovereign Claus Patera, whose status is overturned by the overwhelming progressist advance of the newly forming empire, represented by the American Hercules Bell, who propagandizes a necessary and pressing rebellion against the abuses of the Kingdom.
Hercules Bell, in order to induce the people to the revolt, publishes an inspired proclamation where there is also the depiction of a female figure completely similar to the Statue of Liberty of the United States (which is right away inspired to Semiramis of Babylon), which brings a sentence where the tripartite motto of the French Revolution is associated with Masonic ideals.
In the conclusion of his proclamation, Bell exhorts the readers to be all "children of Lucifer", while previously he is giving the appellative of Satan to Patera: the illuministic ideals of the American are proposed as bearers of light (Lucifer = light bearer), but evidently they serve for nothing else but to hand the dominion from a demon to another.
In fact the true interest of Bell is to take the power of the Realm to put his hands on its immense wealths. The American casts disorder in that rotten world only in the hope to take possession of the supposed treasures of the sovereign Patera; eventually Bell and the other forces called to sustain this revolution will be disappointed: of the Dream Realm, that is crumbled sinking in the mud as in an Atlantean apocalypse, won't remain but slime, wastes and ash.

In this political antagonism, Kubin stays neutral, leaving the inheritance of the world, that is finally freed from the schizophrenia of the conquerors, to the pacific autochtonous inhabitants with blue eyes, that populate those lands with mystical peace since before the arrival of Patera.
Alfred Kubin, despite a troubled life and the propensity to depict disquieting scenes, proves to have a lot of equilibrium, to succeed in understanding the harmony, with a Taoist balancing and a monist understanding of the Cosmos; so that he ends the novel with the sentence "The Demiurge is a hybrid."

This antagonism between preservation and revolution culminates with the apocalyptic final fight between the two mighty contenders to the supremacy, Patera and Bell, that are turned into colossuses of cosmic dimensions.
In the fight, their bodies melt together nullifying one each other, becoming an only mass composed by million of crying individuals; the matter returns to the one, to the source, to the quiet of primordial nothing from where everything started and restarts every time: the cosmic Chaos.
At the end Patera, that represents the past, inevitably succumbs, leaving the present to pass.
In this whirlwind caused by antagonist forces there is an acknowledgement of the dualism as generator of the things (as the eraclitean Pólemos), where the surreal vision of the membrum virile, as substantial synthesis of Bell, is a metaphor of the stretching out of the Cosmos toward the side lacking to itself, an attempt to reach the other side in a simultaneous monoecy, the rising as an entity different from the Cosmos, even being also paradoxically equal.
This Love completes "inter feces et urinas" (into faeces and urines), because in the immanent duality of the Creation even the most elevated spirituality will always need a carnal antithesis.

Kubin has a great ability to understand the movements of the mankind, succeeding in foreseeing the big sufferings that the human beings will have to face. This novel offers prophetic visions of the great upsets that the world will face in the years to come. In fact the book precedes few years the first world war, describing the end of the old world of the monarchic empires that will be defeated by the new empire of the democratic republics.

But this prophetic skill goes much further in time: Kubin tells that in Pearl the whole movements of the money happens absolutely in a symbolic and quackish way, the payments were never backed with a real availability of money, that nobody knew after all how much he owns, and everyone sooner or later were getting unexpected earnings and fantastic opportunities as much as facing clamorous losses or fines that reduced them in poverty from dusk till dawn. All of this became true twenty years later in the Great Depression caused by the Wall Street collapse in 1929, which was caused right by the virtualization of money, that is to say the great economic speculation that yet nowadays it is based on the excessive distribution of money not really backed by a value in gold or by a real wealth produced by the people.

Still going further, the prophetic visions of Kubin reach recent times.
Over the city of Pearl a tedious feeling constantly lingers: the citizens do feel to be like puppets, they do not think to be able to decide their own life, which seems to be in the hands of a superior mind which decides their destiny, rewarding or punishing with the purpose to correct their behaviour.
Kubin explains that the Dream Realm is indeed dominated by this government that controls and spies every aspects of the life of its subjects as an eye that penetrates in every crack and can not be eluded, almighty and sole certainty to which the Realm's inhabitants can appeal to when in the need.
That is the power of the Ruler, who with a "mesmeric force" manipulates the destiny of his Kingdom, which runs like a creation of his mind, as a projection of his thought, as a dream, as the Dream.
Kubin depicts this monstrous power full of awful curiosity, which extends in every place, as an octopus that penetrates inside the homes of the people with flexible tentacles, omnipresent, as fugacious as obstinate, managing to manipulate the destiny of the people and the course of events.
There are sensationally evident correlations with the control of the masses, that in today's reality is performed at every level through a variegated and capillary insinuation of the mass-media and the systems of mass control in the private life of people: from the cell phones to the internet, from the analysis of the supermarkets customers to biometrics databases, from the television to the closed circuit cameras, from the environmental spying to the satellites, which are all connected to an omniscient control web that records everything.

Kubin is a precursor of what has been exposed in recent movies like "The Matrix" (1999) by the Wachowski brothers, which is a metaphor of the contemporary society, or even before in the kafkaesque "Brazil" (1985) by Terry Gilliam, and in the unmissable novel "1984" or "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1849) by George Orwell, which nowadays unfortunately can not even be much considered a political fiction.
With these topics Kubin is advising us that our society and all its problems is just an induced dream, of which we could command the end in the instant when we all decided to wake up, or at least that we could modify with the force of thought simply knowing that it is just a dream; everything could disappear as it disappears the Realm of Pearl with no trace.
In fact, in the novel by Kubin, the incapability to realize that one is living in a dream, is that prejudice, for "the world can not be changed", which creeps in the homes as an octopus and it pervades the lazy inhabitants of Pearl, who live their condition innerly, taking no care for the reality, living maintained by the dream which is provided by the Sovereign-octopus thanks to his capillary tentacles (which today we could identify in the television) with which he manipulates his subjects turned into puppets.

Always speaking about prophetic visions, Kubin reaches our days and over: the fact for the Dream Realm is perpetually covered by a mysterious blanket of clouds, which deprives the inhabitants of a healthy sunlight, seems to depict what in the latest years is really delineating as the biggest wickedness that mankind is going to perform: the geoengineering through the weather manipulations, among which there is the insane will to dim the sunlight through the dispersion of toxic aerosols into the atmosphere, with the pretext to aim to defend us from the climatic variations of the planet Earth.

At the end of the novel the Dream of Patera is disintegrating and the American fails in his search for wealths. All the wishes of supremacy have set; the individual remains, in the person of the protagonist, who witnesses the catastrophic events caused by those deceptive wishes of power; the native inhabitants remain: primitive, serene, so simple and so depositaries of an ancient wisdom.

In the period that precedes the final apocalypse, as it always happens, clamorous events and "tribulations" do happen.
At first the wild nature, from a state of calm absence, suddenly storms in the city as it has gone crazy: animals of every species and ants of every kind pour in the capital: they are like the mice that abandon the sinking ship, saving themselves when they first perceive the danger.
Then the people too is starting to show insane behaviours more and more, more than usual, more than what would have ever happened even in the ill-famed French district: there are happening scenes in sequential progression, like in a Via Crucis, of homicidal madness, of maniacal violence, of millenarian lasciviousness, of desperate abandonment into the abulia, of cannibalism, while the Realm shows the signs of a corruption which is no more only spiritual: the mould, the rust, the dirt and the rotting wins and covers anything.

During this progressive and unstoppable disintegration, the protagonist lives an experience of mystical visions and of spiritual elevation that open to him the doors to a deep knowledge of Cosmos, while the autochtonous people with blue eyes do assist with serene indifference.
The description that Kubin makes of the autochtonous inhabitants, native of the lands where the Dream Realm has risen, makes come to mind the story of the redskins during the conquest of North America, and generally all the pre-Columbian populations who suffered the colonialist invasions of the Europeans. When the Dream Realm disappears into the nothing altogether with all its supposed wealths, in those lands the sun and the ancient balance of the meek native people do return.
This proves the desire of justice that Alfred Kubin feels and his blame for the prevaricating greed that poisons the world; the same retired life of him, in the wild country between animals, is a confirmation of it.

The people with blue eyes will take care of the funeral of the Sovereign: he has turned again to be a mortal man; its body, now stripped of all the vanities and corruptions, and after having suffered a terrible expiation, it lies in a calm and religious atmosphere showing a sacred, perfect and human beauty. The attention with which Kubin describes the corpse of Patera, of supernatural perfection and beauty, is a confirmation of his intimate admiration for the sacredness of the Nature and the perfection of the Creation, as well as of his feeling for respectful pietas.

Kubin writes this novel right after the death of his father. Patera himself is the father of that ancient world which is disintegrating under the shovels of the renewal: in Greek pateras means father.

Conclusions

The novel is a bright and coherent description of surreal events that prophetically have become our real recent history. The weak and conservative calm is overwhelmed by the revolution of the modernity sweetened with unbridled dances, excessive wealth and feasts, which however bring to the over excitation, to the stress and the obsession, to an extreme unbalancing that determines the collapse of both the antagonist parts, the mutual nullifying into a violent impact of opposite charges.
In this fight, both the luciferian Bell and the satanic Patera, are temping the people with thrilling or reassuring promises, but at the end of the story the purest human being wins, unattackable by the schizophrenia; the individual wins, as it wins the calmness of the blue eyed natives who were relegated in the suburb where they have waited with patience for the quenching of these schizophrenic and destructive impulses.


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