Homo Ludens
Exhibitions, Italy, Ragusa, Scicli, 07 June 2014
Antonio Labruna during his studies started experimenting with painting, drawing and easily took the way to traditional and digital animation and illustrations. So: theory, fine art and digital art. Finally, in this series of works, evolves again with an unusual technique: ink, pencil and acrylic colors on cardboard, rigorously recycled, and sometimes wood. A return to the use of the material surface, treated as if it were a sculpture, a bas-relief, removing the surface layers of the substrate, but also a reminder to digital, in choosing a clean design,he often use just the single line of contour to give the desired image. A job that progresses, we might say, for 'subtraction' of the surfaces, taking advantage of the internal complexity of a 'poor' material abandoned and returned to new, unexpected and illustrious life. The result is a background whose smoothness alternating with the newly underlying roughness it is the ideal scene for his subjects.
Antonio Labruna seems to raise a surfacing veil to take a peek at the rough 'under' also in the topics covered in fact, behind the pleasure of a beautiful design conceal a genuine denunciation. The man who spends his life in search of material goods and prestige, such as a car, or a man that uncritically believes in a religion witch captures more bans than serenity of faith, or the man in his environment, with total indifference and constantly exploitation of nature, here this man wanders alone and unaware of being totally dominated and crushed by the weight of what he wants to dominate, putting so much effort in find and having in his possession.
Denunciation of consumerism, religion blind, culture if understood only as sterile holding books, exploitation of the environment, its flora and its fauna (even the protected endangered): man going on his own. We do not know where it walks like a modern Telamon, crushed by the weight of its own abuses and possessions.
The Past in the animation actually betrays the author witch does not escape entirely to the taste of telling a story, frame by frame, episode after episode, in a proper sequence that the observer follows going step by step to the right following the main character, naked and anonymous, so one man among many then, the man in general.
It is the story of a well-defined path, and veiled denunciation of direct provocation to the last work, in which the author seems to suggest its own solution, the only one possible. The balance on the earth is always precarious but possible only if the result of collaboration and not of prevarication, of lonely men with men alone.


Anna Terranova

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