Curated by Marialuisa Pastò
21 July - 7 September 2018
Soyuz
Palazzo Mezzopreti Gomez
Viale Bovio 29
Pescara, PE 65122
The aspiration of the individual towards
a state of gratification is an instinctive phenomenon.
Impulse generates desire, the appetite
abandons itself to the need – longing towards a fulfillment that, even in
deprivation, meets the pleasure of the denied object.
As a matter of facts, there is a certain satisfaction
in sacrifice, a certain relief in abstinence. Impulse and deprivation refer to one another, because both imply the
tension towards an object of satisfaction.
But fulfillment knows
conditions that pleasure ignores.
It is the strenuous and paradoxical result of shifting borders, often found in the space between public and private.
It is the strenuous and paradoxical result of shifting borders, often found in the space between public and private.
Constantly divided in the opposition
between singularity and plurality, the experience of fulfillment requires a hedonistic
indulgence that often collides with the homologative direction of the common sense.
Unders displays the symbols of a private, intimate and silent ritual; stuck in
the dichotomical limbo between instinct and reason, the characters of the
exhibited works speak of
an atavistic and dark depth. They are hanging in the balance between research
and fulfillment, caught in the rest of waiting before the action.
A prime example of this is the drawing of
Vanessa Gully Santiago: the dark and disturbing atmosphere of her works
stylizes the private dynamics of intimate submission, control structures and
female sexuality, of which she examines conflicts and psychological conditions.
Pleasure and deprivation appear here as two opposite and complementary
conditions, that resolve in the uncertainty between attraction towards the first
and longing towards the latter.
In the work of Giuseppe Desiato,
provocation dissolves in an exuberance of meaning in which eroticism achieves a
dreamlike and spectral vision that praises the cheeky uncovering of a castrating
moralism.
The identity clarification in Urs Lüthi’s
work, on the other hand, drives us towards the awareness of duality, vanitas
and masking at the same time, thus dismantling the
univocal certainty of identity.
The result is not just the abstraction of
the face. The characters of these works also
deprive us of time, creating a space between day and night, light and shadow –
as is clear in Frederik Van Simaey’s work.
And it’s exactly between here and there
that everyone’s desires and unconfessed impulses reside; Benny Van den
Meulengracht-Vrancx’s
sculptures are ever-changing polymorphous entities, stretching between what
they are and what they aim to become.
Through what we
might describe as a contemporary translation of the great romantic theme of
Infinity, the subjects of the works project their vision towards an impalpable
indistinct. Oriented towards undefined distances, they preclude us from the
object of their contemplation. Excluding us from that limitless and hazy world
of the territories of their seeing,
they embrace a kind of otherness that we can’t know.
They unfold in the shape of private
biographies that find their voices in silent monologues and that – in the
privileged narrative space of self-representation – favor the return to the
other, looking for a residual empathy.
Absorbed in the unlimited desire of inhabiting the shadows of their
deepest fantasies and at the same time of reconnecting to a shared wholeness,
they embody that derangement of the look that finds in the private the enraptured shelter of the mysteries of their inner
life.
- Marialuisa Pastò