EXHIBITION n.83
EXHIBITION TITLE: Imago Mentis
ARTISTS: Davide Coltro, Fabrice De Nola, Sebastiano Guerrera, Massimo Livadiotti, Giorgio Lupattelli, Tito Marci, Antonello Matarazzo, Adriano Nardi, Caterina Notte, Fabrizio Passarella, Luisa Raffaelli, Claudio Spoletini, Silvano Tessarollo, Giuseppe Verga, Mario Volpi
CURATED BY: GABRIELE PERRETTA
PERIOD: APRIL 2003 - JULY 2003

artists: Cast, Davide Coltro, Fabrice De Nola, Sebastiano Guerrera, Massimo Livadiotti, Giorgio Lupattelli, Tito Marci, Antonello Matarazzo, Adriano Nardi, Caterina Notte, Fabrizio Passarella, Luisa Raffaelli, Claudio Spoletini, Silvano Tessarollo, Giuseppe Verga, Mario Volpi.

“Simple, smooth, nude, unadorned, light, insubstantial, palpable, woolly, obvious, direct, abandoned to itself, for brief attractive travels, some parts pleasing, likeable, obvious but not too much, direct, finished, addressed to the success and to the easy fingerhold, nailed down, supported by the painting like easy earnings, backed by photographs that base themselves on direct contact with reality, surprising, brief, short-lived, then still consuming, diluted, superficial, synthetic, symposium from copy vulgar and area of common places.”

These are the different acceptances with which one can define the collected images in Imago Mentis and the sense of this kind of collective. Similar senses, values, judgements are those which misunderstanding whistles in the ears of the artists that participate. At first sight it seems that Imago Mentis is dedicated to an area almost fragile to the debate on the images and that the images themselves should always be combined in a brief state of art. Infact, the performances gathered by the artists cover the evolution and the plot, the overlapping and the ambitious ever understanding of the mirrors of our society. A life of society that means “stay in the world”, rather than the defence of simplicity.

Hence finding that they provoke, making a dialog the fantomatic icon that these images emulate, the exhibition makes play of that which it represents, trying to sustain – at the limits of sarcasm and irony – the questions: “are they truly simple or superficial, to read and to walk about the iconography here involved and assembled? Are they really only fetishes, those which appear evidently like manufactured goods or cyberwork of the exhibition? Or behind this cover of images they aspire to a sort of total imagery that is real and a mentis? And to whose mind could this be? From which strange findings, from which twisted reasoning, from which thinness or quibble, would be able to display a simple painting, a photograph technically elaborated in classic detail of reproduction, or according to versatile proposals of the last technological generation?"


In the era of preventive wars and the authorized massacre of the Capital with Gorgone’s thousands of faces, in the time of decisions of the stronger over the weaker, the rich over the poorer, the bigger over the smaller, to these questions it is almost impossible to respond and hence seems the images hold up the false role of Mnemosine, between the anomalous shadows of deceitful precision, within the reproduction of past sensations and with the advantage to obscure the hope of the intuition (or intention) of the concept (of the conact of the understanding).

Nell’epoca della guerra preventiva e del massacro autorizzato dal Capitale con i mille volti della Gorgone, nel tempo della decisione del più forte sul più debole, del più ricco sul più povero, del più grande sul più piccolo, a queste domande è quasi impossibile rispondere e quindi sembra che l’immagine si trattenga sul ruolo di mendace Mnemosine, tra le ombre anomale dell’ingannevole percezione, entro il riprodursi di sensazioni passate e col vantaggio di oscurare la speranza di un’intuizione (o intenzione) del concetto (del conato della comprensione)