IMPERFECT REALITIES

Olivia Spatola

 

 

Imperfect realities, alternative realities, parallel universes, a product of not only decontestualizations but of the changes of both collective and popular imagery.These are the visual elaborations of the artists selected for this exhibition.

Karin Andersen, Massimo Giacon, Veronica Montanino and Adrian Tranquilli “push” the boundaries of figurative art to the point of making it interact with espressive forms of “popular” culture such as comic strip, science fiction and other genres considered “low”.

Linking these artists is a conceptual motivation ready to use the body and its physicality to bring into discussion the rhetorical and other customs and usages of our society. It is a collection of images of interconnecting genres in a diacronic and syncronic sense able to relate every iconography reducing it to interchanging codes. Every one of these universes is a marriage of the contemporary and the fantastic, of fiction and myth, of impossible realities and possible fantasies.

 

Veronica Montanino bases her work on the theory that contemporary man lives in a society victim to an inescapable excess of knowledge and self-awareness towards various aspects of reality. The excess of information and the scientific sounding of every thing and its possible development are perceived by the artist as oppressive and difficult to annul impositions.

For Veronica the objective is to “stimulate the abandonment of the vigilant state” that represents our society. The artist endeavours, in a neo-romantic way, to win the social ”super-me” and in the sleeping state of reason lets escape another space-time dimension that multiplies in the reality for superimposition as a perceptive interference that changes the appearance of things.

Even though these works are environmental interventions rather than wall hung plexiglass there is always present in her work a dialogue with space and a link with the circular form.

Veronica’s utopic space is a modified reality in a joyful and fantastical sense – a colourful and psychedelic pop-universe. Human forms and punctiform galaxies are the distinctive keys to her pictorial language. The human presence is nullified by the plastic and expressive values; an iconographical repertory that ranges from simple every day gestures to those of athletes until reaching the artistic iconography of the past.

A population of shadows, human semblances, logo-morphic syntheses that move fleetingly in an imaginary space that unpredictably change and break into the space of reality. A universe that is a microcosm visualized by an imaginary  microscope. The psychedelic and concentric colours of the chromatic-plastic splashes are diffused by the invasion and saturation of the space.

A micro-macrocosmic bubble-universe that is both invasive and invaded. The pop-virus of innocence contaminates the adult seriousness of the world to make the space of reality playful and disengaged from the drama.