Biography
Manuel Quintiero self-taught artist from Argentina, was born in Salerno in 1985. I see in him the man of the street, born in a ghetto of the city of Salerno and saved from delinquency by Redda Boucherfe, a French-Algerian who brought breakdance in Campania. In the concrete jungles the selection is often cruel, in this sense the hip-hop has acted as a redemption letting Manuel discover that there is no shame in his social condition, and that the same hardness of his own daily life could be channeled in a positive flow of creativity.
Manuel starts soon to exhibit in Europe and becomes part of the “Cafardo Energizer”, a crew of Salerno that from the end of the nineties explore the underground creativity: breaking, mc’s, writing and DJing. After the multiple break of the right knee, Manuel drops out of the breakdance forever, but soon starts looking for a new language that could however dialogue with the world that is close to him: the urban space. In this sense the city automatically reveals itself as a necessary place in which to move the terms of an “act of conflict”. That same contemporary city, suspended between the business needs and the frustrations of those who live in it, becomes the horizon within which to converge his critic. Deconstructing the reality as a good situationist. This happens only in the city where the aesthetic dimension is diverse and dynamic, where logic has become non-sequential, where communicability happens by images and visuality is present in every aspect of life.
In the age of turbulence arises Age of Block, a work comprehensible by everyone. A scream that spreads among people. A sculpture installed in the street tries to break the monotony of the passers-by. Our liability will condemn future generations (the child) to support the weight of our in-actions (the block). It is a visual shock: a child trapped within the limits of a society gradually more and more austere.
Quintiero’s research leads more and more towards a visualizing process. Or the ability to vaporize the concrete matter in image, to make of it a strongly symbolic icon. With my own two hands is almost an updated Benedictine ”ora et labora”, a proof of strong ethic and artistic responsibility. The “rock” (in which the hands are stuck) is the rhetoric of information that persuades us to live far from ourselves. One of the last works is Dinner Strike. The installation anticipates a lunch that won’t take place. On the table there are two hands holding a fork and a knife. On the opposite side of the table an empty plate. In the middle traces of a dissolved wax substance. The raised table in the absence of gravity, no longer seems to belong to the earth. The whole stands in distance thus becoming a mirage that you won’t ever reach. Unemployment as a consequence of the inexorable defeat?
All the work of Quintiero manages to desecrate any meaning. An aesthetic on the edge of the “pop” that fully embodies the positivity of today’s society, but that is only a bait for the viewer, as Byung-Chul Han reminds: the society of performance, it’s the unlimited “I can do” or the famous “Yes we can”, behind which is hidden the social unconscious that is clearly animated by the effort to maximize the production becoming a society of the fatigue. The ravings of Manuel are the need to build an action as a measure of time and of the being. In the end, the production of aesthetic gestures is a game of production of irony. As Goethe reminds us: “The irony is the passion that is released in the detachment”.
