|
|
|
|
Galleria Antonella Nicola
Via Baretti 3, 10125 Torino
,
Italy
Tel.++39 011 6503978
Fax++39 011 6686210
Hours: Tue.-Sat. 3pm-7:30pm
Contact: Antonella Nicola
E-mail: a_nicola@libero.it
|
| Galleria Antonella Nicola |
| |
De Blasi e Moscara Mattrha
The creative impulse behind the images of De Blasi and Moscara is action. This action is performance, an experimenting with rituals both ancient and modern. Every gesture, in fact, goes towards the making of a design, which involves a group of people all working to the same end. The action takes place within the whole of the area allotted to it, within its four cardinal points. The viewer, whose perspectival placement often coincides with the lens of the camera, is thus also involved in the action. This co-involvement is fundamental to De Blasi and Moscara’s work. It testifies to the power of social classes, but also to gangs, tribes, and even team games. Another essential element is where the action takes place: in nature, in the open. The actions of De Blasi and Moscara do not only create communities; in them they imagine space as defining place.
Game, ritual, and action are united, contemporaneously dramatic and ironic.
“…there’s a reference to the practices of a popular culture long-since disappeared: a return to the shamanic dances of the “tarantella” in the Puglia region of Italy, to the warrior-like dances around baskets of bread placed on the raw earth, to a deeper exploration of their many manifest meanings and interpretations. The men are young, fertile, and dressed in ordinary clothes: they wear no special costume and stand only for what they are: social animals. And in society —a restricted but nonetheless public society— they act. They exchange dishes, no longer of blood, but of pneuma: of air, of words, and of the spirit of life. They communicate through tubes, canvases, and gestures. They dance blindfold with their arms around each other. They throw stones into the void in a gesture that is apotropaic, and yet propitiatory and divinatory. They approach their meals as though the food had been conquered and the table was the scene of a famous battle.” (Augusto Pieroni)
Entitled Matthra, the artist’s latest project is composed of a series of images and an installation. The key component of the work as a whole is the overlapping of internal and external space: the photographs and the installation both portray an interior whose floor is covered with a mound of earth. The protagonists, as always in a group, behave as though they were out of doors: running about and playing physical games. The interior setting is no longer private; it has become a space without borders, a place for group activity, a continuation of the interior yet contemporaneously an open natural environment lacking every trace of the domestic or familiar, devoid of furniture or any kind of decoration.
Matthra pays homage to nature. Inoffensively invading the home environment, she shows herself at her best: as earth, living and richly aromatic.
Franz De Blasi (Lecce 1973) and Marcello Moscara (Galatina 1972) live and work in Lecce.
|
|
|
|
|
contact
us 
