ROOM 8 – IN THE FIREPLACE HALL
The theme of failure becomes metaphorical in works such as Allumettes #2 (2013).
The works Remember, Repeat, Rework 6 and 7 (2015) are two photographic diptychs realised by Fogarolliby appropriating and collating archive images.
In Locura (2018), a new work from the project Stone of madness, Folgarolli refers to the beliefs prevalent in Northern Europe in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (but also present in prehistoric civilizations) that attributed deviant behaviour, like madness or eccentricity, to the presence of a stone in the human skull. The work is composed of an analogue photograph of a brain with a stone nestled within it, a fluorite, whose chromatic tone changes thanks to the intervention of the spectator, who is invited to interact with it using a device that emits ultraviolet light. In this way, Fogarolli presents an iconographic theme that has its most illustrious precedent in Hieronymus Bosch’s paint The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (1494). In this work, the Dutch master depicts a genre scene in which a charlatan deceives a naive person, from whose head he extracts a flower; the painter, however, exaggerates the arrogance of the deceiver, who wears a funnel-shaped hat on his head, symbolising the idiocy of his alleged knowledge.
