I do not work with symbols, I work with metaphors
I’ll beat about the bush a little, but it’s so nice! The metaphor seems creative and proof of intelligence, while the symbol, which is being eroded by time, seems trivial and obsolete. The cross, for example, is as a whole a symbol for thousands of years, be it Christian, Maltese, Egyptian, St Andrew’s, Greek, Latin or swastika, when you use it is because you do not have anything to say. When your imagination has been completed. When you want to say something simple in a complicated and sophisticated way. In art, symbolism is trying to say in a sign that it might be said plainly. Here comes the problem. How to say in a nice manner what you think. So, if you do not know, you put a symbol hoping that people are happy to discover the great mystery of the artist, a mystery that actually is trivial and easy to understand.
But look how small impostors can become interesting and special people for the ignorant. Put an Egyptian goddess or of any other origin, accompanied by a double cross thrown in a corner, the snake that coils on a belt Doric (or Ionic, depending on how you draw it), an olive branch carried by a white bird mask, a masked Bacchante from Middle Age Venice, put a scales, because you need balance and divine blind judgment in all this hieratic shit….and it’s ready! Have you understand something? No! … You see, art is not for everybody.
Well, I do not create to be understood. Understanding entails, sometimes a lot of bad stuff: compassion, tolerance, comments and analogies, paraphrases and anachronisms, hasty judgments and everything culminates in the end with a lack of understanding. I’d rather remain misunderstood from the beginning … what I had and what I lost!
But at least I try to express myself, to recognize myself in my work. I don’t need shadows around me, I need myself. My thoughts, my ideas with what I feel and think. Unique, as is every human being on this Earth.
Maybe that’s part of us that we forget most often: uniqueness. That’s a shame to get lost in the herd, that we have a mind and we have it to use it. That we don’t have to walk only beaten paths, that we don’t have to hide in the shadows, that we must have the courage to discover new roads, within us. Why? Because an artist it’s wave and wind, because a woman is a constant scattered thought, because a child is a sweet lemon bud, because the sun is a hanging bulb in an infinite ceiling, because the ocean is a tear from one huge eye, because love is a Brownian agitation of undiscovered particles, because your body is a liana curled around mine, an old tree, because happiness is a unknown fruit that we taste time to time without knowing it, because life is a journey of which we only know the end. That’s why I prefer metaphors and I’m bored by symbols.
About Beauty and Divinity
“He who is free may be fool, stupid, repulsive, wretched, just because he is free, but is never ridiculous. The free man has dimension as a human being” Phillip Roth
Beauty and Divinity…. pretty hard to talk about, although clearly they have much in common, at least in the mind of those who believe in both. During the times we tried to relate Beauty to Divinity, for the simple reason that we found it difficult to explain the feeling we have in front of beauty or maybe we are ashamed to admit that beauty has stirred not really immaculate feelings. Nerve centres of admiration and of sexuality are very close to each other between the crowded synapses of our brain, that’s why it’s more simple to explain the excitation we feel when we meet beauty, through divine light which cleans the sensation of hidden guilty desire.
Hmmm, guilty? Perhaps, in a world dominated by dogmas and false meanings imperceptibly inherited, a world that we are tired to understand and we accept it as it is.Our world became a sort of already too long chewed gum, which doesn’t have much flavour and taste, so we feel sometimes the jaws clenched toghether, without understanding why.
Beauty… It is everywhere around us, everything is painfully beautiful from the moment you succede to spit the tasteless chewing gum that you are absently masticating… and you miraculously realize how beautiful everyting is….
It remains one danger… Not to get crazy because too much beauty tires our dull mud-filled brains, you can fight against it only to the extent that you believe that, right in that moment you are in heaven. It might not be exactly like imagined, but believe me, what you know is nothing but a feeling induced by the very moment of death of million of people before you….there’s nothing there…
Beauty is the only here perceived by our bizarre senses… I think sometimes about the days when the spirit was free, before being restricted by the false shame and conformity, before the christianism and the pagan man alteration (seen as a free man) into a weak and helpless being, so easily dominated by the senses. Why? Because free people are powerful and therefore they must be mastered… And how else can you accomplish that if not by impregnated them with fear and reluctance in front of undetermined powers and of a implacable course of life.
I’m bored to believe doubtfully explained abstract notions, I obey the real divine beauty of believing in myself…Me, my personal God… as everyone is, consciously or not, his own god…
“ Something, someone, a spirit followed us all through the desert of life and had to catch us before we touch paradise. Of course, if I think about that know, it’s certainly Death: Death will catch up us before our arrival. The only thing we crave during our life, that make us sigh, groan and bear disgusts of all kinds is the remembrance of a lost supreme happiness, probably felt only inside mother’s womb and never again through our life journey (although we hate the thought) until the moment we die ” Kerouac… words about the primordial happiness… Words related to the happiness we don’t know if we have ever experienced, but we feel it somewhere hidden in us, but unfortunately impossibly to reach inside.
Kerouac was a sad human being, behind the turmoil and the love of never ending roads… Maybe there’s sadness hidden in me too… why?… I don’t know… I have no reason…
De vulgari eloquentia / english version
I think it’s a good idea to tell you about my works. I’m not trying to explain, I’m trying to reveal what it’s hidden behind them. Today I will tell you about “De vulgari eloquentia”, which is included in the MYTOPIA series and was used as poster for my exhibition in Lisbon, on the 30th of July 2011.
As the title says, “about eloquence in vulgarity”, the artwork was inspired from the homonymous writing by Dante Alighieri. In the beginning Dante had conceived it as an essay and finally wanted it as writing in four volumes, but he has stopped at the half of the second. In principle it was written in Latin and it’s about the transition from the use of Latin in Italian by blending it with the vernacular, the vulgar language used by simple people. In Dante’s opinion, language is a living body, constantly changing and developing, hence the image created by me.
In my artwork, Latin is represented by the statue of marble, while the new language is born and alive and is trying to leave the arms of the old language, yet relying on it.
I actually used this metaphor to illustrate the changes that we pass in various stages of life and the way we struggle to break away from the past. And the past is cold and still while the newborn is dynamic and expressive, hence the movement, the dance, the rustle…
“De vulgari eloquentia” is realized in the photo alteration method starting from six different photos, processed in various digital and manual techniques.
There are limited editions (Lamba Prints) of 25 prints, 50×70 cm, and of 10 prints, 70×100 cm, signed, dated and numbered, accompanied by the Certificate of Authenticity.
“De vulgari eloquentia” was realized in November 2010. Details regarding purchase are offered by email.
