Posthumanist is a series of 5 portraits inspired by the problems investigated
by that current of thought known as "Posthumanism".
In particular, I was
interested in broadening the concept of the human to include
technological and natural elements previously considered external, if
not actually in antithesis to human nature.
Humanism placed the
human being at the center of the cosmos: but despite being
harmoniously inserted into its environmental context, the human being
was for the humanist doctrine something profoundly distinct from the
rest of nature, over which it lorded it through technology.
On the contrary,
posthuman man is part of the nature that surrounds him and at the
same time an artefact of the technology of which he was once the
creator.
The contrast
expressed by Posthumanista is that on the one hand human nature seems
to extend, ramify until it is indistinguishable from the environment
that surrounds it, on the other it ceases to exist, in a certain
sense.
Posthumanist
was born from a process of copying and estrangement of portraits
painted mostly during the period of Humanism. They are humanist
portraits that transform into posthuman portraits.
In Untitled I
fragmented the identity of a young man painted by Bronzino, until it
became “a heap of broken images”. At the center of the
composition, like a Buddhist third eye, there is a fingerprint,
perhaps the only sign that can still guarantee our individual
identity in the digital system in which we are inserted.
In Ipertesta
I treated another painting of Bronzino as a support for a reticular
and hypertextual pictorial narrative. The composition is divided into
a network and in each field generated by the lines of the network I
added material, modified or distorted elements.
The reference is
hypertext, a form of digital narration in which the linear structure
of the book has been replaced by a reticular structure and in which
at each junction the user - no longer the passive reader of the book
- can add or modify the narration itself.
In Bar in a Jesus
I take inspiration from Antonello da Messina's Ecce homo, but
in the face of the one who Antonello saw as the man par excellence I
inserted a fluorescent yellow bar and pulled it until the face
transformed of Jesus in a rubbery prosthesis. Is it still the man par
excellence who looks at us from the portrait?
In Fibonacci's
girl the head of a girl and the landscape in the background are
inserted in a cage whose proportions are based on the Fibonacci
Sequence.
With his Sequence,
Fibonacci simplified the Golden Ratio, which according to many
scholars and artists defines the proportions of every natural form.
This number, which would be proof of the existence of a unifying
principle of the universe, was also used to establish the proportions
of beauty in human beings.
In my painting the
golden number becomes an ideological cage that tortures and modifies
the person and the surrounding space according to absurd criteria
that claim to bend nature to human interpretation.
The last painting
takes its inspiration from the faith-filled gaze of a saint, reaching
towards the sky. Only in this case it is not a question of a gaze
directed at God, but of a star imploded in the corner of the
painting: a black hole.
It seems that any
answer that man previously sought in God must be sought by physicists
in the singularity of the black hole. But the encounter with this new
dark divinity would mean the end of anyone who seeks it.
