Mortale/ Erotico/ Visione/ Sogno:
I am on Fire,
or Altare/ offerta/ anatema, 2020
Water, fruit peels, hair, tissue paper, paper, wax, ashes, ribbons, wool threads, dried flowers, fire, pieces of fabric, 2020
Memoria/oblio (Memory/ Oblivion)
Installation with different tissue paper sheets measuring around 1x1,5 m hanging from the walls and the ceiling of a 700s villa with pinkish frescos on the walls. On the floor are candles made with wax, dried fruit peels and plants, hair.
The works are totally visible only when hit by the light from behind or the sides, because of the drawings made on them with pencil and charcoal and a few botanical and fabric elements glued or taped to the back.
The material with these sheets and cloths are made represent the fragility of memory, its shapeshifting nature, the way that desires, dreams, memories mix together and stick to each other in our consciousness, forming our identity.
Religione/ Esoterismo (Religion/ Esotericism),
Estasi / Erotismo (Ecstasy/ Eroticism)
The drawings represent parts of traditional and famous religious paintings portraying saints’ martyrdoms and ecstasies, and sometimes very detailed mystics’ stigmata, which were found in the forms of religious drawings.
I have always been fascinated by these kind of images, often very violent and sometimes pregnant with a deep erotic force: maybe this was my first approach to something that has a clear sexual connotation (a weapon penetrating the flesh, the ecstasy).
As a non believer, I still can’t deny the importance that this painful/erotic/ecstatic/mortuary imaginary had for the developing of my aesthetic taste and my artistic sensibility.
Religion, in this case catholicism, as a “vision of the world” defines the way in which one sees reality, it filters the perception of reality, becoming the glue of memories, mixing with the system of my desires, here in its original sense of “erotica” as tied to love, both spiritual and sensual. This vision of the world is permeated by the structure of our desires, and it regulates it, in some cases it constricts it in specific shapes. But when our memory or identity suffers from a disgregation process, also contradictions or ambiguous forms emerge as presences earlier hidden, as ghosts.
Reliquia/ Altare (Relic/Shrine),
Desiderio/morte (Desire/ Death)
The organic elements hidden behind and inside the hanging sheets and candles remind of the idea of relic and are, in a sense, since they are preserved and full of aftermath “given” meaning, relics themselves. The fascination for these objects dates back, again, to my childhood (I used to go churches and natural history museums, since my family is catholic and I was very passionate about nature), and during the years took me to a particular taste for macabre objects, memorabilia, old photographs of mystics and war mutilated soldiers, dusty churches and ancient fabrics.
Content is form, the medium is the message
What I like the most about this work is that, finally, I seem to have achieved the ability to integrate theory and practice, and I eventually was able to express a fundamental concept of the work through the form of the work itself.
Tissue paper, when hit by wind or light, embodies the concept of shapeshifting as I mean it: my need to make something that is not defined, as my identity and memory; the beauty and delicacy of light pencil signs and tears on light paper, small flower petals, a feminine aesthetic that changes as the sunlight hits it from behind during a day; my ghostly, lunar nature emerges from this work as a subtle melody coming from another room.
Reliquia/anatema is shapeshifter as a witch, as the devil, as something scary because it’s not defined and clear.
Performance
The tissue paper pieces were made during performance sessions: create a shrine, draw around objects, draw other objects, move them, trace their shadow, remove shrine, keep what fell on the paper. Hopefully the lines and signs drawn on the paper show the way they have been made.
References
During my research I came across a few artists and references that helped me finding my way to express what I wanted to say.
I have been influenced by the work of Avis Newman, Betye Saar, Adrien Piper, Jesse Darling, Gina Pane, Joseph Cornell, Joseph Beuys.
As I said, I also copied and traced famous paintings by artists as Caravaggio and Mantegna, but I even looked at some other interesting people that I’d call fringe artists: some (mostly Italian, for some reason) mystics that lived in the past century. I want to mention, among these, the pictures I found of Teresa Neumann, Caterina Bartolotta and Natuzza Evolo: particularly the incredible blood stained cloths and Jesus shaped wounds on Natuzza’s knees and the crosses and blood tears on Caterina’s face.