12 January 2018
From the cave
paintings by Luigi Piccirillo
at Salvatore Serio art gallery,
via Guglielmo Oberdan 8, Naples
The new media have transformed our ability to dream, rework, adhere to reality. The '' liquidity '' existing in human relationships, the split to which we are forced to adapt to continuous change create a constant remodeling of the self. This need of '' adherence '' to the metamorphic of the real generates an identity crisis that, sometimes, we face reconstituting ourselves in a new form, real and invented, idealized and massified together. So the virtuality, more than '' thicken '' the world has, in a sense, pluralized: how many replicants of the same person exist in the network, and in life, how many more?
From the cave, literally '' from the cave '', is the sheltered place where the fear and estrangement from the outside world are fertilized. In the cave, the last place to take refuge, art takes on a very special meaning, a self-revealing mystique, a work of cleaning up the "volatile" superstructures produced by post-modernity. To rummage among the flesh, to try to scrutinize the emotions under the masked skin, is the desperate act of those who stubbornly seek to understand themselves sheltered from chaos. And here the faces, gutted through a pictorial act free from the aid of traditional instruments, are '' excavated '' with their bare hands emulating the 'shamanic' ritual of reading the animal viscera. The artist sinks his palms, irones the formless material, peers her obsessively in an attempt to conceal the nightmare that before him, that set of things called the world, in reality, does not exist. Digging, however, he also realizes another, embarking on a journey that from its depth leads him to cross the history of humanity. On the one hand we find, therefore, an instinctual modus operandi that favors the use of the curved line and the circle, symbol of the uniform primordial substance and homogenized, a reflection of community harmony and equality, typical of ancient pagan cultures; on the other hand, the incorporation of these same sign structures in untidy formats, isolated from each other, almost to underline their breakage. In fact, with the loss of the sense of belonging to the community (the breaking of the circle) in man comes the conviction that the salvation of the soul is directly proportional to the proximity with God. Reason why, some works reflect the pyramidal structure typical of altarpieces of the Middle Ages, a period marked as ours - from apocalyptic phobia and religious hysteria.
Therefore, far from making a chronological and retrospective journey, the meaning of the works seems to take place along the terrain of the anti-narration. In fact, the conceptual dichotomies represented (nature / culture, polytheism / monotheism, individuality / massification) cancel each other out, letting the problems of our times emerge: we are facing the end of the story and the artist, aware of the impossibility of sharing himself , scratches the walls of his cave with the awareness that the outside world does not expect it, does not require it, does not want it, populated as it is by distracted ghosts, malevolent not for attitude and will, but for a pleasant superficiality: the same that it has shattered that harmonic circle and trapped our lives in a huge cavern.
From 12 to 22 January 2018
Vernissage Friday 12 January, 6.00 pm
Monday to Saturday: 10.30-13.00 / 16.00-19.30
paintings by Luigi Piccirillo
at Salvatore Serio art gallery,
via Guglielmo Oberdan 8, Naples
The new media have transformed our ability to dream, rework, adhere to reality. The '' liquidity '' existing in human relationships, the split to which we are forced to adapt to continuous change create a constant remodeling of the self. This need of '' adherence '' to the metamorphic of the real generates an identity crisis that, sometimes, we face reconstituting ourselves in a new form, real and invented, idealized and massified together. So the virtuality, more than '' thicken '' the world has, in a sense, pluralized: how many replicants of the same person exist in the network, and in life, how many more?
From the cave, literally '' from the cave '', is the sheltered place where the fear and estrangement from the outside world are fertilized. In the cave, the last place to take refuge, art takes on a very special meaning, a self-revealing mystique, a work of cleaning up the "volatile" superstructures produced by post-modernity. To rummage among the flesh, to try to scrutinize the emotions under the masked skin, is the desperate act of those who stubbornly seek to understand themselves sheltered from chaos. And here the faces, gutted through a pictorial act free from the aid of traditional instruments, are '' excavated '' with their bare hands emulating the 'shamanic' ritual of reading the animal viscera. The artist sinks his palms, irones the formless material, peers her obsessively in an attempt to conceal the nightmare that before him, that set of things called the world, in reality, does not exist. Digging, however, he also realizes another, embarking on a journey that from its depth leads him to cross the history of humanity. On the one hand we find, therefore, an instinctual modus operandi that favors the use of the curved line and the circle, symbol of the uniform primordial substance and homogenized, a reflection of community harmony and equality, typical of ancient pagan cultures; on the other hand, the incorporation of these same sign structures in untidy formats, isolated from each other, almost to underline their breakage. In fact, with the loss of the sense of belonging to the community (the breaking of the circle) in man comes the conviction that the salvation of the soul is directly proportional to the proximity with God. Reason why, some works reflect the pyramidal structure typical of altarpieces of the Middle Ages, a period marked as ours - from apocalyptic phobia and religious hysteria.
Therefore, far from making a chronological and retrospective journey, the meaning of the works seems to take place along the terrain of the anti-narration. In fact, the conceptual dichotomies represented (nature / culture, polytheism / monotheism, individuality / massification) cancel each other out, letting the problems of our times emerge: we are facing the end of the story and the artist, aware of the impossibility of sharing himself , scratches the walls of his cave with the awareness that the outside world does not expect it, does not require it, does not want it, populated as it is by distracted ghosts, malevolent not for attitude and will, but for a pleasant superficiality: the same that it has shattered that harmonic circle and trapped our lives in a huge cavern.
From 12 to 22 January 2018
Vernissage Friday 12 January, 6.00 pm
Monday to Saturday: 10.30-13.00 / 16.00-19.30
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