La complessità dell’essere umano è da J&PEG restituita attraverso un’esecuzione multilivello, che si avvale di media differenti, in un processo dal carattere fortemente performativo: ricerca e preparazione del setting, fotografia tradizionale di studio, proiezione dell’immagine su un telo manualmente modellato, fotografia dell’immagine scomposta e, infine, sovrapposizione dei due scatti ottenuti in queste fasi, attraverso la post-produzione, per arrivare all’opera finale. Una fotografia in esemplare unico, come unica è l’individualità dell’essere umano. L’umanità è protagonista anche quando non è al centro dell’inquadratura, quando al suo posto è la “natura morta contemporanea” il soggetto degli accurati Still life del duo. La presenza umana si manifesta nella sua assenza, attraverso gli oggetti del suo quotidiano. Negli Still life, in particolare, il tessuto acquisisce una forma a canne d’organo che restituisce tridimensionalità all’oggetto.

Durante il lockdown si è ridefinito il rapporto con la casa e con gli oggetti che la caratterizzano, essi sono tornati ad avere una centralità in una quotidianità che la pandemia aveva privato della frenesia di cui tutti noi eravamo vittime. Questi oggetti – divenuti così strumenti di affezione ma anche di evasione da una forma di reclusione difficile da accettare – attraverso gli scatti di J&PEG acquisiscono un nuovo volto, da inanimati si personalizzano, nella loro interazione descrivono universi immaginari in cui la figura umana idealmente si compone nel paesaggio artificiale che essi delineano. Occhi differenti per delineare quei nuovi mondi di cui tutti noi abbiamo un gran bisogno. L’umanità si rivela nella sua massima intensità, restando fuori dall’inquadratura.

In our present characterized by the frenetic flow of images, how is it possible to describe the complexity of the human being through a photographic representation? What value can we assign to the image, where technocracy, increasingly blurring the boundary between the real and the virtual, has imposed a redefinition of the social mechanisms of interaction and the reformulation of our very being? How many times have we genuinely wondered what lies beneath the surface of those images we see scrolling daily on the web and social networks? How often have we reflected on how much "reality" is inherent in them and whether this contemporary audience of humanity, exposed to the mercy of our avid gaze, truly represents a glimpse of "being" or rather of "appearing"?

Faces, bodies, everyday objects, our own actions, flow and are consumed in the time it takes to get a like and relegated to the farthest corner of the network, irretrievably consigned to the oblivion of a timeless and placeless dimension. The web and social media become a sort of Pandora's box that, once opened, reveals, with all its evidence, the malaise that pervades our society. From this analysis, J&PEG's research emerges - a duo active since 2008, composed of Antonio Managò and Simone Zecubi - who, with the series "Mistica," takes the anthropological analysis that has always characterized their research to a new level of reflection. They appropriate the logic of the machine and the dictates imposed by the technological world to expose the falsification and subsequent transfiguration that our identity undergoes in virtual reality, which simplifies and superficializes everything it incorporates.

In contrast to their previous well-known production, the concept of masking returns, the fabric returns - which previously concealed identity, making everyone protagonists of the representation that the artists theatrically enacted - but with a completely new meaning, as does the attention given to objects, whether they are accessories or elements that characterize a person's essence. In "Mistica," the fabric is a silver cloth - a clear reference to the glossy and glamorous world, but at the same time, a perfect physical transposition of the pixelated dimension through which the image is formed online - acting as a mask that disguises vulnerabilities and brings forth the true essence of the person. The visual fragmentation of the image, achieved through the cloth, becomes an act of restitution and homage to the purest and most intimate identity of the person, liberated from fiction and the societal superstructures imposed upon it. As the artists themselves tell us, the silver cloth "allows us to paint the image through thousands of colored pigments that fragment the fiction to reveal the true real." What remains behind the cloth is subject to temporal transience and destined to be forgotten, while the new essence of being, manifested through these colored pixels that fragment fiction, is the new icon to bring to light.

The complexity of the human being is conveyed by J&PEG through a multilayered execution that employs different media, in a process that is highly performative in nature: research and preparation of the setting, traditional studio photography, projection of the image onto a manually sculpted cloth, photography of the decomposed image, and finally, the overlaying of the two shots obtained in these stages through post-production, to achieve the final artwork. A photograph in a unique exemplar, just as the individuality of the human being is unique. Humanity is the protagonist even when it is not at the center of the frame, when instead, the subject of the duo's meticulous Still Life compositions is the "contemporary still life." Human presence manifests in its absence, through the objects of daily life. In the Still Life works, in particular, the fabric takes on an organ-pipe shape that adds three-dimensionality to the object.

During the lockdown, the relationship with the home and the objects that characterize it was redefined. They regained centrality in a daily life that the pandemic had deprived of the frenzy to which we were all accustomed. These objects - now becoming tools of affection but also means of escape from a form of confinement difficult to accept - acquire a new face through J&PEG's shots. They personalize and, through their interaction, describe imaginary universes in which the human figure ideally blends into the artificial landscape they delineate. Different eyes come together to outline those new worlds that we all desperately need. Humanity reveals itself in its highest intensity, remaining outside the frame.