Imperfect realities, alternative realities, parallel universes, a product of not only decontestualizations but of the changes of both collective and popular imagery.These are the visual elaborations of the artists selected for this exhibition.
Karin Andersen, Massimo Giacon, Veronica Montanino and Adrian Tranquilli "push" the boundaries of figurative art to the point of making it interact with espressive forms of "popular" culture such as comic strip, science fiction and other genres considered "low".
Linking these artists is a conceptual motivation ready to use the body and its physicality to bring into discussion the rhetorical and other customs and usages of our society. It is a collection of images of interconnecting genres in a diacronic and syncronic sense able to relate every iconography reducing it to interchanging codes. Every one of these universes is a marriage of the contemporary and the fantastic, of fiction and myth, of impossible realities and possible fantasies.
KARIN ANDERSEN
Humanism contains in itself the vision of the incompleteness of man. The completeness is sought via culture (that which separates us from the animal world). The crisis of Humanism and its consequent anthropocentric fall has given way , according to some contemporary philosophers, to Posthumanism that resolves to find its wholeness in the hybrid of man/machine and man/animal.
Nonetheless for other philosophers Posthumanism does not really contain the loss of human centrality.Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstom believe that the "Posthuman body is the epicentre of pervasive epistemical changes". According to Katherine Hayles (How we become Posthuman) the cybernetic and techno-optimistic conceptions are not the result of the body-mind concept of traditional western rationalization but are in fact proposed rather as technological transcendency.
Karin Andersen unbalances the human centre with dualities that are uncensored hybrids such as the animal/machine of the "mouse".
Andersen moves away from the concept of making monsters rendered by techno-phobic anguish. The many facets or the space-time niches of the surreal contain a serenity and a formal equilibrium which implicate the acceptance of other realities. Karin Andersen's surrealism astounds and marvels and portrays to us a uniqueness with imagination, a polymorphic reality in which the diversities merge together without creating disturbance.
According to the philosopher Sergio Givone the fear of creating monstrosities is the real sign of our incapability to relate to the "human man" , to the true nature of man, the creation of a fetish of our imagination and resemblance made to avoid looking truthfully into our souls free of the burden of sentiments and ethical and moral complications. The universe of Karin Andersen is a dream limbo that transversely crosses our reality. The interspace in which pours an existential duplicity, distorted and twisted in its genetic rules, is examined by the author through the indifferent eyes of someone who has lost the parameters to judge normality.
"And if diversity is absolute normality? Jungian shadows or a clay golem?"
MASSIMO GIACON
The distinctive characteristic to Massimo Giacon's work is the total freedom of interaction between artistic genres in the intention of a complete nullification of expressive values into interchangeable codes. The constant theme linking his highly varied journey is the unpredictability and the scathing irony present in his work. You can sense a desecrating intention that expresses itself through conceptual declines, "alien interferences" that show themselves in assimilated graphic schemes of our perceptions creating a shiver, a jolt.
Giacon's surrealism is an innocuous appearance by an artist that plays rather than judges.The artist's enjoyment seeps out and is contagious to the beneficiary in a playful interchange of emotions and thoughts.
In his eclectic and multiform work Massimo Giacon's transgression sometimes shows itself in a very marked way. Erotism, philosophy, religion and art lose their valency and become only "asteroids in the Giacon universe"
A large Luna Park (Fun Fair) sucks in the contemporary reality in all its different facets and thanks to the "deformed and coloured lenses" of the artist becomes part of an oneiric festival of delirium and joy.
From an iconographical point of view Giacon's work is characterized by smooth lines, bright and psychedelic colours bound together with contents which are often strong, irreverent and shocking tending to colour the "hard" world transforming it into a "baby shampoo tranquillizer".
In Giacon's universe absolute evil does not exist and even extreme situations are deprived of every dramatic aspect such as death, illness etc. It is essentially a positive world in which a certain dissention is shown towards the marketing of the mass media and the impossibility to adhere to certain aesthetic models imposed by it moreover through the use of propaganda, especially American, displayed in the comic strip books of the 60's and the 70's.
VERONICA MONTANINO
Veronica Montanino bases her work on the theory that contemporary man lives in a society victim to an inescapable excess of knowledge and self-awareness towards various aspects of reality. The excess of information and the scientific sounding of every thing and its possible development are perceived by the artist as oppressive and difficult to annul impositions.
For Veronica the objective is to "stimulate the abandonment of the vigilant state" that represents our society. The artist endeavours, in a neo-romantic way, to win the social "super-me" and in the sleeping state of reason lets escape another space-time dimension that multiplies in the reality for superimposition as a perceptive interference that changes the appearance of things.
Even though these works are environmental interventions rather than wall hung plexiglass there is always present in her work a dialogue with space and a link with the circular form.
Veronica's utopic space is a modified reality in a joyful and fantastical sense - a colourful and psychedelic pop-universe. Human forms and punctiform galaxies are the distinctive keys to her pictorial language. The human presence is nullified by the plastic and expressive values; an iconographical repertory that ranges from simple every day gestures to those of athletes until reaching the artistic iconography of the past.
A population of shadows, human semblances, logo-morphic syntheses that move fleetingly in an imaginary space that unpredictably change and break into the space of reality. A universe that is a microcosm visualized by an imaginary microscope. The psychedelic and concentric colours of the chromatic-plastic splashes are diffused by the invasion and saturation of the space.
A micro-macrocosmic bubble-universe that is both invasive and invaded. The pop-virus of innocence contaminates the adult seriousness of the world to make the space of reality playful and disengaged from the drama.
ADRIAN TRANQUILLI
Adrian Tranquilli's work relates to the body, to the physicalness of existense through an expressive short circuit playing on the interaction between the mediatic universe of the cinema and the comic strip with religious myths.
The connection with the contemporary is via a postmodern stamp due to the sense of new elaboration and citation of other images. The artist shows his desire to slow down the speed of the mass media (cinema, comic strip, video clip) by seizing certain icons and bringing them to life in the slow space-time dimension of contemporary art and its elitist systems.
To fully understand his works relating to Batman we need to go back to the end of the 80's, a truly important time for the comic strip which recovered from an economical and cultural slump.
"Contamination was the magical word, moreover a bringing together of different genres and forms. Confronting them and singling out elements, underlying the affinities, looking for interactions and possible combinations."
The ex-Cinderella of the mass media has passed the exam and is ready to measure up against high and low culture as he pleases. To get to this point has taken years of debates and battles, collisions, editorial courage and the ability to understand and take on other modes of expression.
Years of maturity of the comic strip in the hands of American authors like Frank Miller or the Englishman Alan Moore have encouraged with their works (Batman the Dark Knight Returns and the Watchman) a new interest for media comics.
Nocturnal masked figures with the powers to develop to their best ability the human gifts of intelligence, strength, muscular physique and intuition. These are the motives for which Batman was chosen for the process of Humanization of the super hero who stops his osmotic symbiosis with American political power.
In the Dark Knight Returns Frank Miller narrates the story of an ageing Batman undergoing a major ideological crisis " myths in decline, a hero's weariness that cannot stand up to the fall of the individual castle".
Adrian Tranquilli's Batman gathers up this inheritance demonstrating the hero stripped of his mythical qualities and relegated to the discomfort of existential solitude. In the artist's video Batman is at the same level as a tramp who sleeps/dies on a bench along the river Tevere. Batman is the neighbouring craftsman in the confusion of his workshop, a suburban window cleaner, a city tramp but also any man who is lost in the desolation and the mysticism of the Armenian landscape.
The hero has stopped fighting for an ideal world in which he no longer believes and has melted into the crowd.
*Francesca Lazzarato, Il Manifesto, giovedì 29 luglio 1989
