STORIES

Castello dell’Ovo

Solo Exhibition curated by Marina Guida | Naples - Italy

20.04.2020 - 11.05.2020

The eye does not see things but figures of things that mean other things. 

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. 

Bodies become sculptures; dreams and nightmares shape the weft of reality; visions morph into projections; life becomes a stage and the fiction of drama penetrates the interstices of real life. Truth and verisimilitude, simulation and fiction; photography encounters sculpture, painting, computer graphics, stagecraft, installation and performance. These are the elements that Antonio Managò and Simone Zecubi, the artistic duo J&PEG, use to reproduce the world, delivering up to us a restless universe populated by ghosts and allegories. They assemble iconographic models derived from the history of art, mythology, religion, ancient and new myths and rituals. Pieces of the world, fragments of visions, news stories and states of being come together in a vast timeless jigsaw, scattered with visual inconsistencies and amazing phantasmagorias. Coming across the photographs of J&PEG is like entering a parallel dimension somewhere between dream and reality. One may be captivated by clarity of detail worthy of a Flemish painting, or by the chromatic splendour of a Warhol-like silkscreen. One may lose oneself in works that appear to be conceived straddling the lucid nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch’s Last Judgement and fantasy sets from the world of cinema, or be sucked in by the darkness of Caravaggesque visions or by the bright acidic colours of certain works by Rosso Fiorentino. In their works, the two artists break down the elements of the creative act and mix them together again, blending matter, form, end and skill that were of old the four causes behind Aristotle’s concept of téchne: namely, the human ability to create and produce works. 

There is nothing incidental, then, about why the name of this artistic duo is J&PEG, since this very name indicates their inclination to reflect on everything related to the construction and circulation of images. Nor is it incidental that that this solo show of theirs is called Stories, since the works in this exhibition are conceived in relation to the dynamics of the Instagram stories. They in fact refer to the modes of approach to reality, to the work of art and to the world, so strongly conditioned by the now ubiquitous use of social media. In the creative and artistic operation of J&PEG, and hence in the conceptualisation and realization of the causa efficiens, the cards are further shuffled as regards the ultimate end of these works. Starting from a reflection not yet transformed into an image, J&PEG conceive their work as a set of complex stratifications of different languages that are then fused together. But why? What is the intention? It is definitely not a purpose connected with a mere contemplatio of an aesthetic reality but rather – as already mentioned – of a critique of the contemporary, of the modes of enjoyment and consumption of images, inter alia, and also of the modes of communication and their implications, which condition and determine everything. In the realm of social media it is as if we were in a “labyrinth woven by man”, as Jorge Luis Borges put it in his Ficciones. What counts here is appearance: one is because one appears. The substance doesn’t count, substance is the form that one sees but that no longer has any truth. The substance is configured in ritual gestures and is then concealed, since in any case the fleeting enjoyment of the web transfigures its essence for the user’s own consumption within an eternally provisional timeframe. In this context, identity – mediated by representation and perception – is not what one is but what one wishes to be taken for. In the recent works that conclude the exhibition, the mechanism of this “fictionalisation of reality” that the artists address is very clear. The phrase is taken from Marc Augé’s memorable book The War of Dreams: Studies in Ethno-Fiction, in which he explained that “it is no longer fiction that imitates reality, but reality that reproduces fiction” in an eternal farce of appearance that transfigures all and, in the brief space of a day, consumes it.