Absurd Sculptures
About Absurd Sculptures
The Project
Absurd Sculptures is a visual investigation where the surrealist themes mix with those philosophical and literary of the concept of Absurd. The project aims to carve a new meaning within a visual and conceptual dimension capable of creating the right blackout between, the desire to seek values and meanings intrinsic to being, and the inability to reach them with crystal clear certainty.
To light up this short visual circuit, the pre-production process relies on a research that currently involves 33 sculptures, monuments, fountains and reliefs, with the city of Rome as background.
Famous pieces, such as the angels of Bernini, and treasures hidden by the veil of the everyday life of the passer, such as the harpy of the Palazzo della Consulta, merge with some of the hallmarks of Albert Camus, Eugène Ionesco and other authors, who have given voice to the concept of Absurdo. This meeting of the past rewrites the condition of a present, where everything seems to push to give voice to the urgency, human and emotional, to define the boundaries of one’s existence. An increasingly pressing and unresolved need.
The Reworking Process
It is precisely in the absence of a response that the works find the vital impulse of research, suspended between the color of a dream and an artistic and material surface already existing, sometimes cold and static. In this sense the photographic post-production work takes on fundamental contours. In fact, each photograph is taken according to a point of view as neutral as possible, and then deconstructed in its entirety. By replacing, reworking and, where possible, re-sculpting, pre-existing elements of the sculpture itself, which find a new form, meaning, destination in the image. The possibility of creating new elements, according to the "manual" assembly of components of the original, pushes the viewer towards a new puzzle full of meanings to be composed, at least as much as the digital reprocessing of the image. Finally, the salient note of photographic vision is clearly in color. This, which was not originally foreseen in the realization of the sculptural works, becomes later the organic key to the rhythm and sequence of the photographs. Through the selection and tonalization of the individual elements of the image, the "visual" and iconographic voice is in harmony.
Influences and Iconographies
So, and finally, the references and iconographies of the dream remain in the project. The perception of reality is rewritten according to the dream mechanics of mind that, revealing a new nature of the elements, also recomposes a new matter. The boundaries of a metaphysical imaginary are also opened, where the themes of the first surrealist Dali mix with those of the more conspicuous metaphysical De Chirico, without neglecting the decomposition of scenes and elements peculiar to Bill Brandt and Maya Deren.
Before & After
