MASCARATA _
2016
2016
Unhiding images, text by Maria Giovanna Mancini - Art historian
Photography is the contact zone between diferent spheres, divergent perspectives, it is track of the real and an imaginary sign. Photography is - as many people said during the 20th century – an emblematic fgure of modernity and at the same time measure of the epistemic change in the contemporary world.
Dario Picariello’s training focused on photography and from photography, a few years ago, my research perspective developed. Thanks to photography and the missed opportunity of an exhibition, Dario and I met. The exhibition, in our ambitions, should have occupied with monumental signs, the spaces of palace d’Avalos in Procida. The building formerly used as a prison was the location, not at all neutral, of the photographic cycle Five hundred and one (2015) where the young artist theatrically lived as the fve hundred and frst prisoner appropriating the rooms of the tenement. We cannot imagine how the intentions to intervene in site-specifc would have directed the installations, and yet, we are sure that it would not have been a simple exhibition of photographs.
In Masquerade exhibition project, the need to overcome the feeting image surface, which already emerged in the young artist’s path, has defnitely violated and disrupted photography, taking an objective and space dimension in Raphael’s House. Picariello works frst the attempt to stabilize the action and his own acting, and then rebuilds in objective and environmental terms the complexity of his gaze. It is a failed attempt to begin with, since the photographic image selects, for its own status, a single fragment in the time series that does not speak for its separateness and uniqueness but rather as part of a stream. The image belongs to the past, that of was - Roland Barthes taught us - and simultaneously to the present time, that of the vision. Because of this ambiguous1 belonging to time passing, photography always talks about death. To underline this condition, in Picariello practice there is the desire to put on stage a primitive ritual. The “sacrifce”, which shares with the sacred the etymological root, shown by Picariello with the use of evocative elements like the mask, the tissue / napkin, the bed cofn, medical tools, the water pitch, has the ability to link irremediably distinct elements in the current imaginary: folklore, rurality and contemporary languages; biological body and political body. The work is created in several stages and in diferent spaces and the fnal exhibition is only one of the possible stories of a stratifcation constantly stirred by the young artist.
Picariello designs, performs, takes photographs, produces installative elements starting from the images interacting with them. Finally, he designs and manufactures a space of relationship between objects, relics of the ritual practice of art; he showcases symbolic devices. The use of the backlit image is an ambiguous solution that ofers to the public gaze the duplicity of the sense of the image that the English language explains in the diference between picture and image2. The projected image that is formed through the beam of light that projects dematerializes the support, which becomes temporary and ephemeral3. Picariello alludes to this ability of the image to be at the same time image on support, the object itself, and image-visual sign. Light, again, de-materializes the image, while tripods, fashes, refectors and screens return the object presence to the point of transforming the technical tools in symbolically-signifcant elements. Among rites, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, the French scholar founding father of the discipline of Anthropology wrote about sacrifce, “a religious act that, by the consecration of the victim, changes the status of the moral person who does it and the status of certain objects the person is interested in4”. The sacrifce is both to amplify and to destroy. It establishes a contact between the divine and the human being by means of a sacrifcial victim, animate or inanimate. Transit, the procession precisely, from the human to the divine, Mariapaola Fimiani wrote electing Mauss a prominent voice in the analysis of the archaic, has the double movement of the gift, and at the same time by virtue of the presence of a sacrifcial thing releases a power. “A duplicity - the philosopher writes - marked by the loss and by the growth, by the putting to death and the power of life [...] necessary condition of the mingling and uncertain welcome, of an irreducible métissage5”. The reference to the sacrifce has an ambiguous aspect at every level: the intellectuals who since 1937 worked on the Collège de sociologie emphasized the two-faced nature of sacrifce. Leiris, who with Bataille and Caillois shared the surrealist season, fascinated by bullfghting where the bull is both divine and real, attributed a ritual and celebratory character to the brutal killing of the bull, a “show pulse detector of hidden and profound tensions6”, where bull and bullfghter have a caractère sculptural7. Signifcantly, the reference to the processions, the actual rituals telling a still tangible persistence in rural contemporary culture of archaic reasons, the artist promptly records and transforms into the installation project, makes refect upon the notion of sacrifce in Dario Picariello artwork.
The rituality, of which we perceive fragments and not a slavish narrative, is imbued with that irreducible métissage that cannot solve the poles of speech in a dialectical solution. The rituality arouses through totems and maskings, constructed by the artist for the Realization of photographic images but - some also exhibited - independentlt from it, assuming an autonomous artistic value, culminates in the execution of the body. The body disappears rom the room-prison leaving a photographic track, his shroud.
1. Barthes write: «nella fotografa si produce una congiunzione illogica tra qui e un tempo».
Cfr. R. Barthes, ed.it. L’ovvio e l’ottuso, Einaudi, Torino 2001, p. 34.
2. See W.J.T., Mitchell Pictorial turn. Saggi di cultura visuale, Duepunti, Palermo 2009.
3. D. Païni, R. Krauss, Should we put an end to Projection?, in «October», vol. 110, autumn 2004, pp. 23-48
4. H. Hubert e M. Mauss, Saggio sul sacrificio, Morcelliana, Brescia 2002, p. 22.
5. M. Fimiani, L’arcaico e l’attuale, Lévy-Bruhl, Mauss, Foucault, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2000, p. 133.
6. S. Zuliani, Michel Leiris, lo spazio dell’arte, Liguori Editore, Naples 2002, p. 26.
7. M. Leiris, De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie [1946], in Id. L’ Âge d’homme, Gallimard, Paris 2014.
Dario Picariello’s training focused on photography and from photography, a few years ago, my research perspective developed. Thanks to photography and the missed opportunity of an exhibition, Dario and I met. The exhibition, in our ambitions, should have occupied with monumental signs, the spaces of palace d’Avalos in Procida. The building formerly used as a prison was the location, not at all neutral, of the photographic cycle Five hundred and one (2015) where the young artist theatrically lived as the fve hundred and frst prisoner appropriating the rooms of the tenement. We cannot imagine how the intentions to intervene in site-specifc would have directed the installations, and yet, we are sure that it would not have been a simple exhibition of photographs.
In Masquerade exhibition project, the need to overcome the feeting image surface, which already emerged in the young artist’s path, has defnitely violated and disrupted photography, taking an objective and space dimension in Raphael’s House. Picariello works frst the attempt to stabilize the action and his own acting, and then rebuilds in objective and environmental terms the complexity of his gaze. It is a failed attempt to begin with, since the photographic image selects, for its own status, a single fragment in the time series that does not speak for its separateness and uniqueness but rather as part of a stream. The image belongs to the past, that of was - Roland Barthes taught us - and simultaneously to the present time, that of the vision. Because of this ambiguous1 belonging to time passing, photography always talks about death. To underline this condition, in Picariello practice there is the desire to put on stage a primitive ritual. The “sacrifce”, which shares with the sacred the etymological root, shown by Picariello with the use of evocative elements like the mask, the tissue / napkin, the bed cofn, medical tools, the water pitch, has the ability to link irremediably distinct elements in the current imaginary: folklore, rurality and contemporary languages; biological body and political body. The work is created in several stages and in diferent spaces and the fnal exhibition is only one of the possible stories of a stratifcation constantly stirred by the young artist.
Picariello designs, performs, takes photographs, produces installative elements starting from the images interacting with them. Finally, he designs and manufactures a space of relationship between objects, relics of the ritual practice of art; he showcases symbolic devices. The use of the backlit image is an ambiguous solution that ofers to the public gaze the duplicity of the sense of the image that the English language explains in the diference between picture and image2. The projected image that is formed through the beam of light that projects dematerializes the support, which becomes temporary and ephemeral3. Picariello alludes to this ability of the image to be at the same time image on support, the object itself, and image-visual sign. Light, again, de-materializes the image, while tripods, fashes, refectors and screens return the object presence to the point of transforming the technical tools in symbolically-signifcant elements. Among rites, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, the French scholar founding father of the discipline of Anthropology wrote about sacrifce, “a religious act that, by the consecration of the victim, changes the status of the moral person who does it and the status of certain objects the person is interested in4”. The sacrifce is both to amplify and to destroy. It establishes a contact between the divine and the human being by means of a sacrifcial victim, animate or inanimate. Transit, the procession precisely, from the human to the divine, Mariapaola Fimiani wrote electing Mauss a prominent voice in the analysis of the archaic, has the double movement of the gift, and at the same time by virtue of the presence of a sacrifcial thing releases a power. “A duplicity - the philosopher writes - marked by the loss and by the growth, by the putting to death and the power of life [...] necessary condition of the mingling and uncertain welcome, of an irreducible métissage5”. The reference to the sacrifce has an ambiguous aspect at every level: the intellectuals who since 1937 worked on the Collège de sociologie emphasized the two-faced nature of sacrifce. Leiris, who with Bataille and Caillois shared the surrealist season, fascinated by bullfghting where the bull is both divine and real, attributed a ritual and celebratory character to the brutal killing of the bull, a “show pulse detector of hidden and profound tensions6”, where bull and bullfghter have a caractère sculptural7. Signifcantly, the reference to the processions, the actual rituals telling a still tangible persistence in rural contemporary culture of archaic reasons, the artist promptly records and transforms into the installation project, makes refect upon the notion of sacrifce in Dario Picariello artwork.
The rituality, of which we perceive fragments and not a slavish narrative, is imbued with that irreducible métissage that cannot solve the poles of speech in a dialectical solution. The rituality arouses through totems and maskings, constructed by the artist for the Realization of photographic images but - some also exhibited - independentlt from it, assuming an autonomous artistic value, culminates in the execution of the body. The body disappears rom the room-prison leaving a photographic track, his shroud.
1. Barthes write: «nella fotografa si produce una congiunzione illogica tra qui e un tempo».
Cfr. R. Barthes, ed.it. L’ovvio e l’ottuso, Einaudi, Torino 2001, p. 34.
2. See W.J.T., Mitchell Pictorial turn. Saggi di cultura visuale, Duepunti, Palermo 2009.
3. D. Païni, R. Krauss, Should we put an end to Projection?, in «October», vol. 110, autumn 2004, pp. 23-48
4. H. Hubert e M. Mauss, Saggio sul sacrificio, Morcelliana, Brescia 2002, p. 22.
5. M. Fimiani, L’arcaico e l’attuale, Lévy-Bruhl, Mauss, Foucault, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2000, p. 133.
6. S. Zuliani, Michel Leiris, lo spazio dell’arte, Liguori Editore, Naples 2002, p. 26.
7. M. Leiris, De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie [1946], in Id. L’ Âge d’homme, Gallimard, Paris 2014.
translations by
Alessandra Di Sante
Alessandra Di Sante