“The
origin isn’t just located in a chronological past, it’s a
contemporary of the historical flux and keeps acting through it, just
as the embryo keeps living in tissues of organisms that reached
maturity, or the child in the phychic life of the adult”.
G.
Agamben “What’s contemporary”
The
work belongs to the series “Faces from the dark / towards the
light”, which is part of a bigger project I’m working on, made of
installations and visual art pieces about contemporary relationship
to bodiliness, here especially investigating our idea of identity,
and of origin.
Starting
from the unavoidable fact that as organic entities we belong to the
body, and moving in search of an original foundation, I arrived to
the symbol-image of human fetus, the generative archetype of our
being in this world.
The
works are gathered in a corpus of 28 “Formemute” / “Muteshapes”,
works on paper inspired by human fetuses, monads, original places to
go back to, only visible in the light.
A
tranfiguration of fetuses that can be seen in ecographies, I imagined
them in the womb of the universe, blind and ignorant: “Blind in
order to see without moving in all directions, ignorant to let the
Whole reach spirit and body” (F. Roustang “Il suffit d’un
geste”). I pictured them in the crack of time between existence and
non-existence, between light and darkness, as silent beings, absorbed
in the organic-cellular flux and in resonance with the cosmical flux
they come from.
This composition of four pieces (each of 30 x 40 cm) of the same subject narrates the work in its creative evolution.
At
first, the creative process is carried out through painting,
switching between moments of construction and distruction, to deepen
and let reappear a backlit shape that finds a balance between what’s
defined and undefined, and where I enhance the traces and
imperfections as part of the vital process of creation. In the second
phase the unfinished work is placed on a lightbox and photographed,
then printed on Awagami paper and finished with graphical and
pictorial interventions.
This
process creates a dialogue between the creative act of painting and
the photographic technique, which I use as a “pictorial mean”,
between the living matter of natural pigments and earth the piece is
made of in the first phase, and that of photography capturing the
essential. In the pictorial intervention on photography I enhance
some aspects to establish a more subtle and transparent veil of
materiality.
