BOLOGNA ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS – DIEGO ZUELLI
It's amazing to see how 3d computer graphics in contemporary art show visual and emotional influences that were believed to be out-dated in the so-called new media era. This demonstrates how technological development doesn't break the bonds with the past, but is rather a natural evolution.
Diego Zuelli's work enhances this way of thinking; he utilizes the most advanced techniques for digital reconstructions, never forgetting art history in chromatic and arrangement terms. Everything is made keeping an eye on the present age, without falling into sterile repetitions and traditionalism, in fact proposing a different world vision, updated to modern logic. What strikes most in Zuelli's work is the simplicity of his videos, formally flawless and copious in symbolic meanings. Actions are simple and cyclically repeated, almost hypnotically, with a minimal presence or lack of sound. Rigorously computer-generated.
In Rotazione n.1 the artist creates a strong tie with the environment. The video and the surroundings become one, the main visual component is the perspective break-through effect. The lack of a clear and disruptive action highlights the little interest the artist has for narration, emphasizing instead the uneasiness hinted by the water vortex. Recalling A Descent into the Maelström by Edgar A. Poe, or the cylindrical sea described by Arthur C. Clarke in the sci-fi novel Rendezvous with Rama. We stated how the art of the past centuries pops up every now and then in the digital era of simulated space. There are citations of two major masterworks, very distant from each other but very close to the artist: Correggio's Assumption of the Virgin, and Marcel Duchamp's Rotoreliefs.
Text by Luca Panaro
BOLOGNA ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS – DAVIDE VIVALDI
A sculpture (conventional definition that here appears as impertinent) aimed at identifying the other aspect of iconologies, shapes and patterns that are apparently known and recognizable: that is what is revealed in the works and installations by Davide Vivaldi.
A sculpture which is dialectic towards tradition yet secretly dialogues with it, evocative, nostalgic and ironic at the same time; a decentralized, anti-monumental, precarious sculpture, conceptually non-finished, opposed to the anthropocentric conception of ancient memory and dedicated to the laterality of a personal thought which revisits the subjects as being things among things, as a residual humanity that is difficult to identify (the title Borderline is frequently used), in a context of non-defined hierarchies.
Where even the noble and canonical materials of sculpture – we could say for a semantic consistency between substance and form - resign their role to others: poor and primary materials (chalk, clay and concrete), or recycled wrecks. They are raw materials of a different arché, claiming its space, with the unbearable insistence of the stuttering of a child (sometimes angry, and disturbing as the new baby), or with the silent eloquence of a fragment, of a recomposed detritus, of re-ennobled slag, which impose their persistent presence. Any work or installation thus opens a confusing and intransitive story that remains so, unless you dare to share it.
Text by Adriano Baccilieri
BOLOGNA ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS – LINDA VIGIANI
With her accurate yet spontaneous technique, Linda Vigiani’s approach to art is functional to her sensitivity. In doing so, marble becomes a malleable means which gives birth to her idea of synthesis. The snake, symbol of perpetual change, can be identified with the spinal column, the place where Kundalini energy resides. The two images are osmotically spiral-shaped: on one hand, the head of the snake turns into the shape of the sacrum; on the other hand, its body shows elements that call to mind the vertebrae, ribs, and sternum of a vertebrate being. Shape does not invade space; it rather allows its expansion through the winding movement of the sculpture’s body and the succession of full and void. The power of this work makes everything empty around it, and its preponderant dynamism makes time eternal. The piece is alive in space and makes it movable and physical. The serpentine-like movement and the details gather the light, which adjusts and grades the shape into a symbol, defining the skeleton and the life-giving spiritual energy.
This work brings the traditional plastic canons to new life, but it deprives them of some alluring details such as the shape of the flesh, aiming to go straight to the original structure of every being. Linda asserts her perception through symbols and shapes that might recall ancient fossils. However, nothing is static: unexpected telluric movements shake everything, acting as primitive thrusts and needs that reawaken the spirit and lead to a new life. Geometrical shapes can sometimes be recalled, making sinusoid topological and assuming a perpetual development in time, depending on the light that determines their motion.
Perception is faster than Word. The references of the shapes are only residue of commonly known reality, and the spinal column is the expression of immateriality, of spirit.
Text by Filargino Frusciante
BOLOGNA ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS – LUCIO TERENZI
One of the accounts of our time begins when form and matter are no longer measurable, science has extended its limits and art has assumed the possibility of a multiple and layered vision. All of this is realized in an essential and spiral motion where simplicity becomes complex, an overlaying, a disembodied glance and time transforms into a being freed as it switches from slowing down to speeding up.
Lucio Terenzi has woven these tensions into his work, a veritable grammar to define his own language which in Realizzazione di un motivo (Lettera a Bernard) frees form from every constriction letting the act of vision become a field of happenings and possible relationships. Volume gradually peels away, space opens up and time undergoes that same disassociation that the original has undergone (like that of a bale of hay) which has cut through it, broken it apart, squashing it and leaving it wounded (the empty spaces) and which has acted from within, transforming itself. It is as if this work is retelling the birth of a child that maintains a formal relationship with the parent (material and context), the character, the impetus to change (elevation of the soul and tension to change as evidenced in the empty spaces) and a faithfulness to history that unites the singularity of territory and the genius loci to a historical understanding and an aesthetic filled with the present and the past.
Text by Elena Forin
BOLOGNA ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS – FABIO ROMANO
1) A view that becomes a vision. Or vice versa. And an organic object that becomes a find.
2) In the case of landscapes the decision is taken by the observer, in the case of archaeologies, by someone who feels.
... there remains the fact that the ambivalence in the works of Fabio Romano and his indiscriminate use of the media generate a series of possible views of the eye and the mind, focussed on the same subject, as in an oriental game.
3) Elevations. And plans. Horizontal and vertical planes. Static images, moving images.
4) Initially some of his plastic notes and fragments seem to seek a possible relationship with classical sculpture, certainly the viewpoint, vertical and erect, where you have to walk around it, as Giulio Carlo Argan insisted in his manuals; but it is only an illusion, because they do not possess that necessary gravity (considering the materials used, polyurethane foam) that requires you to perform the Argan ritual.
5) Instead his plastic models, which do not yet have to be looked at in a precise way and seem more like observing objects that ones to be observed, silently draw our gaze towards industrial archaeological features and lead us - through colours and accumulated sediments of powder and pigments - to discoveries in which we can appreciate the catastrophe wrought by nature or, to the same extent, by the hand of man.
6) With intents that developed after and independently of their construction, which perhaps started just as a game, and considering the plastic models as real stage sets, Romano often simulates atmospheric and geological events, on an uncertain scale that is never defined, filming the event with digital micro cameras and producing short videos…
...or with more contemplative and reflective dynamics he reformats the entire research according to the idea of the landscape, seeking the possibility of translating into a view-painter’s image, almost a panorama, the infinite opportunities offered by these huge maquettes which were sculptures by intent and origin, allowing the eye to scan them slowly through the macro lens, returning with new views or visions of an almost disconcerting immobility.
Text by Luca Caccioni