EXHIBITION n.86
EXHIBITION TITLE: LIBERA - MENTE SOPRA
ARTIST: Carmine Calvanese
CURATED BY: EDOARDO DI MAURO
PERIOD: 6 MARCH 2004 - 17 APRIL 2004

Carmine Calvanese is one of the most representative exponents of the area of "ironic conceptualism" that, in Italy, is irreversibly imposing itself, helped by a diffused fatigue of the uninterrupted sequence of neo-conceptual findings, many art papers and aesthetic tendencies empty of significance beyond a diligent, but uninspired citation, of how abundantly already seen in the recent past that they have qualified in negative in the 1990's. In the sphere of one long and not yet concluded "end of the century", which beginnings are set after the second half of the 70's, the conclusion of a long and revolutionary cycle of the avant-garde twentieth-century style, marked from the citation of the characterizing experiences of that historic period, at first the painting, followed by various other areas of research, in a climate still current of stylistic eclecticism, Calvanese and some of her companions of the street connote visa versa for an ample dose of irreverent and caustic derision of many common places of the collective imagination, in coexistence with that part of historic area of the conceptual, better able to represent the Italian "local genius", symbolized by authors, among others, Piero Manzoni, Pino Pascali, Piero Gilardi, Alighiero Boetti, Aldo Mondino. From an aesthetic point of view the works present themselves characterized by whimsical eclecticism, branded is the space granted to decoration, frequent the use of painting, expressed in an analytic and conceptual manner, on the other hand with a "primary" intervention on an ample object inventory. In the sphere of a frequent use of form coming from the lucid imaginary of the infancy, we assist, moreover, a structured typology that foresees the use of synthetic materials and plastic derivatives, suited to the carrying out of the assembly from the lively and bright coloration.

Carmine Calvanese places on this wake with the distinctiveness of a very particular style that gives her works in these times a fundamental element of immediate recognizability. Calvanese works draw on rare external, mostly images laid out in sequence along a axis of the installations, interlaced and shaken from moving sussultatory, in a skilful alternation if fullness and emptiness and a balance obtained between order and disorder, with a vivacity made up decisively of neo-baroque. The artist in general plans and builds her object inventory "in toto", with a rare craftsman like devotion and skill, in coexistence with that re-evaluation of the "technique" that is passing through the best parts of contemporary art, both Italian and international, after years discounted intellectualism outside of the maximum time. Conscious of the importance and the sincerity of her proposals Calvanese doesn't fear pressing the accelerator on the side of the pushed decoration, to the point of intentionally brushing and sometimes passing through the mined territory of kitsch. Calvanese's works manifest flexibility from the point of view of the assembly, they can be arranged indifferently of the ground or on the walls, in the corner of an apartment or in a larger ambient or urban area. The more relevant iconography in her works reminds us of how, in our port-modern, once can find unexpected coexistences, from a formal point of view with the seasons of pre-modern. In fact the joyous images and irrelevantly scattered in paratactical sequence on the surface, among the various things, than can without a doubt remind us of wall motives typical of late antique art, for example Pompeian or, to remain in the area of the twentieth-century, the hyper-decoratism, wide-ranging also to the applied arts of the second futurism, in particular of Balla and Depero. Certainly Carmine Calvanese's production is not indifferent, it can provoke equally pleasure and repulsion, and it's there to remind us that art is a complex totality, not referable to monothematic interpretations, and it also made up of amazement and intense emotional involvement.

Edoardo Di Mauro