The Paris Biennal has for years offered to its artists numerous possibilties for practising art in non conventional way. Above all, in 2006, many new, eclectic personalities have been have presented to the public, capable of animating the stage even if, as we shall see, they are virtual personalities.
Among these the most frequently seen has been a young girl of Milanese adoption who answers to the name of Christina Show.
She had a difficult childhood, we are told in the book "Christina Show, fragments of life, written by Aldo Spoldi and published by Feltrinelli. She is delicate, yet has a vigorous desire to know others and to make herself known.
Her origins are to be sought in Brazil and Romania, places that have really inspired her. They flower continually in her experiences of life, enabling her to
approach art, music, sex, friendship, with a simple and affecting ingenuity, which touches all our hearts.
What a shock, to discover and have to admit that this Christina is nothing hut a pure invention, a
personality dreamed up by the mind of the students of Academia di Brera, beginning in 1996, with the marvellous co-ordination of Professor Aldo Spoldi.
We have asked Professor Spoldi what a virtual personality is, and he has replied: "to conceive a virtual personality is in a sense to work on a sculture, on a rounded whole .Here the global realisation embraces a thousand spheres, a thousand languages ,and all the situations deriving from reality are are mixed and transferred to the world of virtuality. The result is that " creators" and "enjoyers" of the work overlap, to the point of confusion (positive confusion) of reality with as much imagination as we can discover.
In this way the students of the Academia di Brera, become producers, articers, and financers of personality transforming the Academy into a real postmodern workshop of art. School, studio, master, pupil, production, theory, real practice and unreal practice. The Academy itself becomes the pretext for developing and enabling the students to become artificers and creators of everything".
But as often happens in almost all inventions, positive moments alternate with negative ones constantly. There are out and out moments of crisis. These, viewed in the first place as
moments of impasse, come later to be resolved brillantly with the creation of new situations, often connected with the introduction of new personalities.
This has been the case, for example, with the meeting between Christina Show and the philosopher
Andrea Bortolon who is to very soon to become engaged to her, or art critic Angelo Spettacoli. These are personalities, with characters different from Christina. But they are entrusted with the job of saving her from herself, in moments in which her straight path seems lost.
Following the course already traced by the pupils of Professor Spoldi, another lecture room of the Academia di Brera, has literally changed form and content trasforming itself in that ideological and material experience which everyone calls the Trattoria da Salvatore; a virtual laboratory created in 1996 by Nicola Salvatore, on the model of the Christina Show.
The author of this affirms: " In this connection, I have tried to create interactions between the didactic and industry, the fine arts and economics.
Lecture Room 8 of the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, equipped as a kitchen, becomes a meeting place for discussions not only between students, teachers and artists but also between cooks, lawyers and doctors. Lecture Room 8 is thus transformed into a metaphycal place, where sense and intellect live together in harmony and where food, an aggregating factor, is subject of "pure form", and emblem of a symbolical universe.
"Trattoria da Salvatore" is exceptional in that nothing here is done alone. There is a continuous search for partners to promote investigations and projects for artists, so it is possible to operate and be creative, within a system of art, but also within an economic-industrial system, which now exists almost everywhere.
The products in question, range from gadgets to calenders, from the production of objects for the kitchen to foods and drinks, all rigorously signed "Trattoria da Salvatore". .
And so it happens that the two experiences born from the same artistic "desire" are combined. The Christina Show and Trattoria da Salvatore, as confirmed by the authors themselves, formalise the fusion of the two projects, joining them. In the academlic year 2006 the teachings of painting envisaged by Professor Nicola Salvatore, together with the course in illustration of Professor Spoldi, have given new life to an event of great artistic and social interest. So within the "working party", formed in 1996 when the projects were conceived, there has been a significant shift in consciousness itself.
The fusion of these two personalities has enabled the two Workshops to generate a third and new structure, a sort of super Workshop of post-modern art. There has been a great assimilation from
an economic point of view involving supermarkets and commercial centres, confirming once again a prolific and interesting simbiosis between art and economics.
