Metamorphosis

From 23 September to 2 November 2011 a Ravenna, Cripta Rasponi, Hanging Gardens - Palazzo della Provincia. In this exhibition, Giuliano Babini continues his narration around a theme which, now more than ever before, is perfectly in tune with these increasingly fluid and evanescent times: metamorphosis, mutation, the absence of a specific genre, of a limit between human and inhuman, between beauty and ugliness, between love and perversion. The bestiary staged by Babini presents a series of therianthropic creatures which are undergoing transformation, caught in one of the many moments of their time, another time, which can’t be ascribed to our categories, a sacred, hierophanic and powerful time. Bast, Wippellino, Nesto & Nesta, Teresa the guardian of outdated values, Androgino, Autunno, Sacrificato, S-natura are sphinxes, calf-dogs, deer-boar, mutant and transgender hybrids, threshold beings, Dionysian and orgiastic in their essence, free and fleeting of every category, subtly ironic and moving, in the end. This really contemporary mythopoeia is close, in the topoi investigated, to the research of Matthew Barney and Robert Gligorov, but also to the surrealist territories, to the metamorphosis of Savinio and Ernst. Here too, beauty is undoubtedly convulsed and offers little reassurance and, as in the Bretonian diktat, perturbing and full of charm. And the materials, refined yet disturbing at the same time, adhere to these poetics, blending the sacred and the secular, the short and the tall, vitreous pastes and horn-shaped mother-of-pearl, polyurethanes and gelatinous and almost decomposed silicones. The plastic gesture sinks down and caresses of the bodies with extreme refinement, conveying them a throbbing vibration, either of birth or death (who knows?) and crowning them with perfect jewels of mosaic art. It is the kratophanic space of a discordant and restless beauty, always fleeting, unheimlich and deep, not to be feared, but to be welcomed and accepted, being an unfathomable reflection of our shadows. (Sabina Ghinassi)