WORKING MATES / Visible reflections of a couple at work

Poggiali Gallery

Solo exhibition curated by Achille Bonito Oliva | Florence - Italy

01.05.2008 - 01.16.2008

In the course of its history contemporary art has exploded numerous myths, including that of the artist as a solitary creator and the notion of art itself as the mere formalisation of an obscure intuition. What is instead clear is that, in the course of its complex evolution contemporary art has asserted, and increasingly continues to assert, the possibility of the work as fruit of a collective endeavour and the affirmation of a definition of itself as the capacity to formulate theories and thoughts visually.

This is what is achieved by the pair of artists Antonio Managò and Simone Zecubi, who have produced a series of works hovering between painting, photography and installation, which tend to render manifest their vision of the world and give visibility to individual meditations on the state of human affairs. Their case confirms once more that art is not an answer to the problems of the world. If anything, art is a systematic probing, the reiteration of the profound and philosophic anxietas of the artist who fixes his gaze on the world to render the invisible visible, as Paul Klee said.

At an artistic level Antonio and Simone represent an authentic couple at work. In effect, they systematically produce an iconography capable of positing metaphysical issues, conceptual perplexities, philosophical investigations, captions illustrative of a universe continually put to the test by their paradoxes.

Art, even classical art that seems to be far removed from the contemporary, has always focused its tormented gaze on the appearances of life. Now Antonio and Simone resume this uneasy practice, activating it with more experimental means of expression and destining it to public fruition. Naturally, this implicates the problem of communication, the need to render manifest their conceptual investigation utilising every medium with conceptual transparency and clarity.

And so the two young artists set to work, generating via the image a series of meditations through the illustration of paradoxical states of the image. Effectively the works document the tendency of the pair to push life towards a condition of impossibility. The paradox then becomes the only mode of shifting all rigidity towards the flexibility of a new iconography that can do all and shirks nothing.

To make this operation even more evident, Antonio and Simone deliberately use a didactic iconography, the capacity to illustrate without drama a metaphysics that acts behind every vision and that authorises all and inhibits nothing. Each composition is upheld by a Magritte-type transparency, deliberately illustrated with glossy elegance and brilliant colour.

Working together the artists create a visible world of Baroque flavour and Caravaggesque theatricality, penetrated by stimuli and situations that declare man’s need to evade the mere noise of life and social homologation.

The pair, in public and production terms labelled J &Peg (deriving from the acronym of the standard for the compression of digital images), with felicitous squinting exploit Caravaggesque slants of light attenuated by the glamour of images constructed as on a cinema set. The dramatic naturalism of Caravaggio is here overturned in a perennial installation of anthropological and objective elements, clowns, models, men, women and children, occupy a completely artificial theatrical space. All this is symbolic of the artifice that dominates our lives and conceptualises all our visions of things.

Even when the image becomes atrocious and perverse, that is when it grazes the nightmares of Bosch, the iconography of J&Peg veers in the direction of a visual pause poised on the threshold of drowsiness, a felicitously irresponsible delirium that adopts the omnipotence of Peter Pan and the implausible fantasies of Alice in Wonderland.

The J&Peg couple sets to work with serene kleptomania, pointing up attitudes, postures, behaviour and the metamorphosis of figures that appear designed to represent an original theatre of life.

Painting, sculpture, photography and installations are set at the service of a mode of staging that can catapult the contemplation of the public beyond an exclusive condition of daytime intelligence. Here instead the scene expands the intermediate spaces of aesthetic enjoyment, and intuits the possibility of claiming, along with Baudelaire, that the Beautiful is always a promise of happiness.

Naturally, here the Beautiful is deliberately constructed. It consistently harks back to an elsewhere made possible by technological reproduction, but also whittled by craftsmanlike skill. The coexistence of different media engenders an iconography that inhabits the borderline between enigma and explicit meaning. Here art appears to claim an uncommon vocation, that of being a sort of Mouth of Truth, which does not utter ambiguous and obscure judgements but rather points up man’s need to mark out psychological and social boundaries. To do this, at the level of communication J&Peg exploit the familiarity of the enjoyment yielded up to the greater public by cinema, photography, theatre and the virtuality of interactive games.

The work becomes a fantastic play station, a playroom for the gaze that is immersed in a flow of images set up with a dextrous attention to detail and  a sense of the scenographic, where nothing is left to chance. Naturally, the titles of the works are all strictly in English. Precisely to underscore the global circulation that art has always aspired to, and that now boosts its universal vocation, through the adoption of the official language of the art system. Short, interrogative titles, verging on the onomatopoeic. They always  appear intended to stimulate the capacity of the observer, putting him to the test before images that stop at nothing, ready to construct and reconstruct any mental impulse, body out every psychological and conceptual phantasm. The phantasms originate from multiple universes, from history and geography, from Greek and Roman statuary to the Wizard of Oz. All being in any case brought back to the familiarity of the glossy image, to debunk everything rendering it at once improbable and, in the end, enjoyable.

Wafting over the whole is a breath of the irony that, according to Goethe, is the passion unleashed by detachment. J&Peg utilise art to represent, in an objective and necessarily detached manner, an anthropological condition corresponding to our post-modern era which evokes not transformation, but the interval of an eternal present.

Yet the entire production is fruit of a balancing between image and thought. It appears to confirm Leonardo da Vinci’s claim that painting is a cerebral matter. The use of techniques that are easily reproductive and reproducible also amplifies the conceptual nature of a painting that is never an end in itself: that turns to literature, informatics and even to current events for aid.

In the end, all references to reality and to human and animal nature are always filtered by a gaze that can never be naked and direct. As Warhol has clearly shown, the neutrality, objectivity and impersonality of the media are always humanised and brought back to the personal vision of the artist who represents the complexity of the world and never reduces it.