Hero, 2005. Tecnica mista 107 x 73 x 126
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." *
Know Yourself.
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, Thursday, 29 July 1989
