CASO 04-852b / Print and acrylic on PVC, 180 x 250 cm, 2011

[COMMON CASE]

Gagliardi Art System Gallery

Solo exhibition curated by Alberto Mugnaini | Turin - Italy

10.05.2012 - 10.06.2012

In the art of Antonio Managò and Simone Zecubi, aka J&PEG, the photo-painted result is the final stage of a process, in which the two artists engage in a true performance. During this performance, the artists themselves, sometimes helped by other actors, embody the subjects of their works. The figures, emerging from a black background, appear like identities in transit: sculpted and almost frozen by light, they find themselves enveloped in a jacket that, while revealing their features and imprisoning their gestures, also unveils hidden aspects of them, like a surface that digs deep into their essence.

They are images of migrants, refugees taking a break on the road, nothing more than splinters of everyday media imagination. And yet, wrapped in a film that trembles under the light, these images become essential, they turn into a purified code, as if they were covered by a dress, which paradoxically exposes and unveils the secret crystallography of their being in transit. The plastic art of J&PEG consists in a search for the visual code, the symbolic hieroglyph of our current living. The loss of identity it expresses refers to a stereotyped identity, and the anxiety that pervades these images is the anxiety of objectified subjects, who stage their own selves, giving birth to a theater of chrysalises: here, theater itself blends with things. The photographic pose becomes a break along a crossing path, a pause during a trip, a frozen moment in a unifying transit, which gives a shape to the flow of being in the eye-of-the-storm of the contemporary world.

What does it mean to reread these visual cliches, to embody these shreds of mediascape, to immerse oneself so deeply in someone's identity as to get tangled up, almost sealed up, in it? What we see are indeed common images, shared by such a large portion of humanity, repeated and mirrored so many times, that they lose all connotations of individuality. They even become, in certain respects, invisible, following the perverse mechanism of a visibility so saturated that, according to Paul Virilio, it finally translates into an art of blinding. Why then does one feel the need to mount a photographic set and tap again into these perpetually muted, devalued frames? The journey, the wandering, the passage, have been stripped of even the last flicker of romance, they have become not only a common case, but a common place of vision. As for their tormented protagonists, they are nothing more than the addressees of indifference. Ritualizing their postures, then, modeling such exhaustion and dispossession of their bodies, and linking them back to duration and possession, can signify a will to rock the boat of this accumulated habit, this paralysis of meaning. It could be a way to unblock and burst the potential drowned in what S. M. Eisenstein referred to as “the indifferent order of things”. The work of art commands us to distance ourselves from documentary reality - suggested the great filmmaker -, to open up the image to pathos and ecstasy. Thus actors would have to become the living letters of extra-ordinary feelings, mirrors of a sort of hyper-significant transformation.

The procedure of J&PEG apparently goes in the opposite direction: being aware that pathos and tragic poses have been corroded by the rust of their perennial ostentation, to the point of falling into the sphere of the unperceived, into the emotional lethargy and anesthesia of feelings, their strategy for attacking the indifference and inertia of the 'blinded vision' consists, indeed, in wrapping these images of ordinary unease in patinas and films, closing them into the packaging of their own gestures, hardening them into the layered effluvium that emanates from the whole baggage of tiredness they carry with them, along with trunks and suitcases. Somehow it is like blinding a blind spot. Indistinguishable from the protuberances of the objects and packages they are unified with, blending into a single bulge - one would say that these silhouettes turn themselves into baggages, plunging, and fitting, into a merely accessorial dimension.

Behind the scenes / Dressing process before the shooting

CASO 03-852 / Print and acrylic on PVC, 140 x 180 cm, 2011

Detail of the exhibition / Gagliardi Art System Gallery, 2011

In the accurate counter-positioning of this 'placental' performing quality, actors carefully adhere to the structure of gestures and poses. The result is a magnification of their plastic filigree, of their bone texture. What is lost is the humoral circulation of bodies - the complexion, the alphabet of look, the physiognomic evidence evaporate: the human traits are like turned into insects, portrayed in the hollow shells of their simulacra, the fetishes of themselves. The performers not only get inside the personality of their characters, they even slip under their skin, actually giving life to humanoid tapestries, where fabric and skin can no longer be told apart. These characters are captured in the moment when they are excluded from the living flesh of the world, almost as if they, too, wore the thickened patinas of indifference or suspicion, the lazy seed-coat of our looks.

Made alien to the transparent interfacing of glances - as if the living mirror of the heart were draped, and the windows of the soul armored, as it were -, these receptacles of ordinary communication, however, are sure to welcome a pure ray of catharsis at the end of their wandering as bodies, at the peak of their standstill as simulacra. We actually see these sculpted bundles, these wrappings of perplexity, these mannequins of waiting and stopping off, in the moment when they declare their dis-embodiment, and at the same time find themselves tapered into ivory poses by a light of grace, as a halo of radiance and ecstasy forms around them, the ecstasy that seemed to be preemptively denied to them along the route of looks and humoral oozing - instead, they recapture it in their plastic completeness, in the shining of their selenite clarity. Haloed with a mineralized, alabaster-like light, they are now purified from the last crust of calendar and gazette, as their halo is freed from all media or tele-journalism contingency. They acquire an archetypal shine, a plastic fullness that transcends them, projecting them into an other dimension, into a supratemporal statuary, a 'classicism' in which the adjective common regains its lost etymological flavor of a concordant sharing of meaning - as if, by giving up the possession of flesh, the figures could regain their sculptural aura, a substance that is not merely phenomenal, the quality of a frieze on a temple tympanum or gable, an emblem-like concision. Cloaked in a heroic everyday, the dream of the ancient umbrae silentes, the silent shadows, lives again in them. And who knows, maybe the coded paths of our contemporary reality are to be found just in these dreams.

G8

CASO ZERO