COSA IMPORTA SE SONO CADUTO?
Andrea Mastrovito
This work initially arises from a song, the cover of Soft Cell’s Tainted Love. I refer more to the video then the song, the constellations coming to life, and, as made-of-stars dancers, pushing a guy to leave his home and his insane love. I instantly thought to use the fluorescent stars, the sticky ones that are used in children bedrooms, to get a situation that defuses the Nietzschean emphasis of the work in the next room – 120578, in which I represent myself and the world piercing the sky by grapeshots – and that were a prelude for the following one, genuinely playful by using the pop icon Freddie Mercury in his ’80s style version. Of course the work would have been too light without linking the fluorescent stars with a modest and ancient material, meaningful of opposite meanings, as the carbon paper is, that, matt, it catches and chews lights and colours, swallowing them into the darkness. Thinking of this work and of the powerful contrast between a shiny white and a total black, I figured the image of my mother in the day of her church wedding. Inspite of all the brides she was total black dressed. I remember that when I was a child, every time she was showing to friends the family pictures, I used to ask her why she was dressing like that. “I liked that way” was her answer. So I started to look for one of those pictures, I wanted one of them, where both her and my father were distracted by anything. And I got to find it! You can clearly see both of them (and my grandfather as well) observing and pointing something in the ground. I took them and moved in the wood, at night, where without lights you can’t see in your own hand. And like this is the wood drown in the carbon paper that reproduces in negative the original big pencil drawing (not showed here). Of course, presented in negative, my mother’s dress is lighter than the black of the background: the whitening process is totally achieved on the infront-wall where, lights off (a timer alternates one minute of light and one minute of darkness), you can spot the mirror and shiny images of Anna and Nicola, made by thousands of fluorescent stars. On the ground, in a messy pile, there are other thousands of shiny stars, the only item that you can see whether lights are on or off and directly matched with the two images that otherwise wouldn’t cross: it’s about a love that lasts every day, in spite of everything. And it’s natural, spontaneously adapting to the soil, contrary to the violent vision of love in the opposite room: Rocco (Siffredi) e i suoi fratelli.
