"Masculin Féminin" / Flaminia Veronesi
17 April – 5 June, 2021
CASTIGLIONI
Via Giuseppe Luosi, 30
20131 Milan
Flaminia Veronesi’s symbolic universe is so free, so rich in quotations, associations and visual inventions, mythological echoes and dreamlike fantasies, that it seems almost reductive to argue it in words. However, I will try. And it is precisely by starting with the Masculin Féminin that the artist entitles her debut solo exhibition.
A reconnaissance of the roots of being and identity, named after Jean-Luc Godard’s homonymous film. A plot in fifteen pictu-res, in which the director has assembled the content of various encounters, dialogues and interviews, investigating at close range the male and female without the great ideals of the first spirit children of Marx and consumerism. Twenty-year-olds in search of love and girls dazzled by the time they live in and its products, which, by interweaving fiction and reality, the film lays bare in all their existential inconsistencies, in the years of Vietnam and on the eve of the cultural revolution of 1968.
For Flaminia it is an important cue to go back to the origin of sexual dichotomies. To transcend the disruptive and dissociative effects of modern rationality. And to investigate the evocative, unifying and transcendent power of symbols, prodromes and paradigms of our knowledge. A universe of mythological creatures and figures from the Old Testament, transporting us into an ancestral and fluid past, in which, as in a dream, roles, sexes, human genders and animal races, goddesses and demigods, cyclops, centaurs and sirens confront and merge. And also, a distant past in which the sexes compare and merge ass to ass, Sisyphus-like machismo is measured willy to willy, faces fly out of the rectum performing anti-gravitational circumvolutions. And buttocks have eyes to see, fish have human legs to walk the earth, while girls can shit on their heads, between childbirth and domestic violence, chapters 6 and 19 of Genesis and the 21st century, misunderstood idylls and ideals of beauty. Flaminia has worked with two colors, merging and separating those pinks and blues, or reds and blues, which have been favored since the 20th century to emblematise the separate and opposing sexes of Eve and Adam. United by God’s will and forever divided by the senseless and disappointing power of human reason and commercial convenience.
I would like to conclude by mentioning the names of Giambattista Vico, Jung, Husserl, Hegel or Galimberti. Authors of readings that paved the way for Flaminia Veronesi’s art and her cult of fantasy.”Wonder”, she writes in her notes, “is the desire to discover what lies beyond the limit. People who no longer use their imagination no longer know that they do not know.” And in front of the artists’ irreverent esoteric and surreal works in pencil, tempera or watercolour. In front of Flaminia’s ark suspended like the house of a baba jaga on bird’s feet or a micro zoo of creatures lined up in enamelled bronze, as if fleeing from the shipwreck of the imagination, it is not difficult to understand what the artist is talking about…
Mariuccia Casadio