Autoritratto con sorriso,
falce
2024
Calcografia ad acquerello su carta
La falce come matrice e come punta. Strumento che rappresenta se stesso.
Che si imprime sulla carta e che traccia i suoi stessi contorni.
E che non può fare a meno di essere sorridente...
TELA DELLA CRISTIANITà
Legno e tela da pittura,
cm 220 x 130 x 4 cm
Tela e telaio per il pittore. Lino e legno come materie prime del mestiere.
Il legno della croce e il lino della Sindone sono altrettanto per i cristiani: supporti fisici e materici della fede.
Qui la croce diventa il telaio, interno e non esterno. Il lino della Sindone viene sostituito dal lino di una tela per pittura fissata, inchiodata, al suo telaio/crocifisso.
Segue l’invito, a ogni cristiano credente, a lasciare un segno, una pennellata, con uno dei colori messi a disposizione dall’artista, così che la sovrapposizione di tutti i segni lasciati diventi un ritratto informale e in continuo cambiamento del popolo cristiano.
“L’arcobaleno sarà il segno dell’alleanza tra me e la terra”, dice Dio a Noè nella Genesi.
In quanto elementi di immediata percezione, i colori nell’iconografia - religiosa e non - diventano simboli. Ogni colore ha il proprio significato, o i propri significati. E altrettanto si può dire per le combinazioni tra i colori, i cosiddetti colori secondari. Infatti dalla maggior percentuale di un colore piuttosto che di un altro, oppure la parità di proporzione tra due colori, si possono evincere significati leggermente diversi, concetti con differenti sfumature.
Nell’iconografia cristiana il viola è il colore della Passione di Cristo.
Perché il viola? Perché è dato dalla perfetta parità tra i colori rosso e blu.
ROSSO: simbolo dell’AMORE DIVINO
BLU: simbolo della sapienza divina, dello Spirito Santo e della VERITÀ
VIOLA: nel viola il rosso e il blu brillano alla pari, si equilibrano. Viola significa quindi “AMORE PER LA VERITÀ”, ma anche “VERITÀ DELL’AMORE”. Se in Dio questi due elementi possono coesistere ed essere uno solo, nell’uomo sono divisi. Ecco per quale motivo si dice che Gesù Cristo portasse la veste rossa e il mantello blu, e che sia proprio mediante la Passione che rese la propria natura (VERITÀ) identica a quella del Dio Padre (AMORE).
Dido’s Lament, 2020
Inspired by the final lament of Dido and Æneas of Henry Purcell.
The opera was written in 1689 on the libretto of Nahum Tate for a female boarding school in Chelsea, in order to celebrate the wedding of William III d’Orange and Marie II Stuart. The story is based on Virgilio’s Æneas, and focused on the short passionate episode of love story between Æneas and Dido, queen of Carthage.
My installation is based on a lamento, the final piece Dido sings, while she is letting herself die because of the pain of having been abandoned by her beloved Æneas.
The elements I translated are:
Lamento: basso ostinato
A chromatic descending scale. In my installation it is represented by actual stairs, that people are asked to walk down (they represent the melody that evolves and changes while the basso ostinato keeps repeating itself). The installation is located at the bottom of the staircase.
Lyrics
“Death is now a welcome guest”. Inspired by the Hellenic tradition of Xenia (a basket full of fruits in the room of a welcome guest), a basket of left over of fruits is the welcome gift for the Death.
Theatre
“When I am laid in earth, may my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast”.
A red velvet drape, as a theatre curtain, laying on the floor. On the top of it there is the basket with fruits, that welcomes every persons who walks the stairs.
This is a performative and interactive installation.
Moreover, a musical performance of a few pieces taken from the opera preceded the experience, in order to introduce people to the feeling, the mood and the story the installation is a about.
DA UNA VOCE ALL’ALTRA, 2016
From a voice to the other
Marble, wool thread 2016
“The artwork is a fugue that goes forever, and we have to stop it tin order to close it: this is called composition.”
Arturo Martini
The “fugue” (typical style of baroque music composition) is indeed the inspiration for this installation.
Here we have the “translation” of a few bars’ section of a three voices counterpoint:
J. S. Bach’s Symphony in three parts BWV 793 in E minor.
In order to convey the meaning of the musical score (it is written in stile fugato) I have drawn down the graphical line of the main melody on three marble stripes, as the three voices playing in canone.
Each line ends differently (as the musical phrases on the score) and they are reproduced in three different proportions - based on the Pythagorean proportions of intervals - to represent that each voice is in a different tonality (first: at the lead tone; second: a fifth upper; the third: one octave lower). .
A red thread flows between the voices (it leaves the first one when the second one enters, and it does the same from the second to the third), shows visually the importance of the theme: the fil rouge of the composition in fugue style.
Pythagorean proportions are used also to measure the vertical distance between the marble stripes
PROFUMO FRUTTATO - 2014
Fruity Perfume
White Carrara marble, fresh fruits 2014
The following installation is my first artwork as installation, my first experiment using a contemporary art language.
The subject of the research is the skin: skin as protection, as peel, as connection between us and the outside world.
On the left end of five of the marble stripes lays a fruit: a cherry, a strawberry, a lemon, a orange and a melon.
On the right end of the marble stripes is reproduced the texture of the corresponding fruit.
The sixth one is different: the texture on the right end is not of a fruit, but of human skin.
Whoever touches the sixth marble stripe becomes the fruit itself, whom skin/peel is reproduced.
ACCORDO - 2013
Triad
Performance, 2013
The dynamics that people established between each other, and especially the equilibrium and the harmony that follow, develop very much likely musical and chromatic harmony.
Only a white triangular support, a musical background, and the three primary colours (as three are the notes in a triad chord).
In this performance people were invited, one at a time, to draw on the white support a sign, only one, but totally free in shape and length, with one of the primary colours on their choice.
This performance proved how every colour (as well as every person) was looking for its own right spot inside a existing, and constantly changing, macroscopic system.
And also, it proved the importance of every single line: even the first line, although at the end completely covered but the subsequent lines, has somehow determined the final result.
This chromatic flow could keep going and changing forever, and we all, as part of a society, take part in it.
INTERVALLI DI TEMPO
Intervals of time
Wood, marble, granite
2016
The renaissance counterpoint is very likely the most strict and bonded by harmonic rules. Especially about intervals.
The following installation reproduces, visually, the closing bars of a beautiful polyphonic renaissance music piece: the Benedictus of the Missa Quarti Toni, Thomas Luis de Victoria.
Considering Intervals as fulcrum of our analysis, when it’s comes to Renaissance music, this work is based on them for the translation: each interval is represented by a different and specific material (ex. The sixth is white marble, the octave is Labrador marble, the third and the tenth are a red and yellow synthetic material etc.). They have specific measures: the height depends by the interval (from short to high by the smallest interval to the greater) and the width depends by the time laps of the interval in the music, fallowing the melodies singing