[extrat from the text]



BODIES...

How surprising the human body is whenever it is represented through art! From time to time banned to be later rediscovered, dissected or dissolved; seen in its details or when the entire structure is reproduced, isolated or in new landscapes, depicted in private scenes or in the sites of urban social life, from one point of wiev to the other, the human figure inspires countless suggestions and reflections. In painting it simulates a new careful approach to the traditional models, adapting portrait to today's sour tastes. In photography it permits to renew characteristics of the avant-garde movements (please note that reference is not mere copying). In more technological works (Digital Painting and Photography) it generates a shift compared to the dexterity of the paintbrush and photography taking strategies. These are three languages in which a dynamic link between corporeity and visual art generates. They establish a relationship which absorbes media features, progress stimuli and a kind of social neuhumanism. It is the product of arteries sending their creative nourishment to the present modified versions of art we enjoy. Please do not confuse the most skilled artists with those who make use of Body Art wothout making it up to date.
I prefer to distance myself from bloody formulas which do not possess irony or aesthetic mediation. Today's art should ask for side analysis, irregular routes, perception beyond sensationalism and mere appearance. To astonish the audience and to gloat in the cathartic drama of wounds is not enough. Tortured bodies are just a legagy of getting hurt through evil, pure violence which violates our look and does not affect our cultural growth at all. We have no need of a didactic body (here is why extremely straightforward painting is useless and so is all the sculpture which simulates the body whitout altering it) but of an "individual body" which is able to lead us to the "open body" of our media world. We feel the need of a body foundation through which we can narrate progress through iconography, a presence which can show the way to possible futures for mankind. What does all this mean? Simply that a body contains the secret of the world. It may appear the same through centuries but it possesses specific features for any time and space.
In the seventies it was imperative to portray it whith a vein of cruelty and wild anger. Today it embodies an era of predominant technologies. Moralists should resign themselves: body and technology are fused in the most stimulating ongoin synergy. Tomorrow it will be easily judged. Now we enter the certainties of today's body: between electronics, flesh technology and instincts becoming more and more primitive, passing through the resistence opposed by physicalness where the technohumanism of the future has its elected residence.

DINAMISM...

The following four artists believe in body but they do not adopt didactic processes. They deal with sexuality and eroticism through autonomous themes rich in personal concepts. What they have in common is the ability to express their ideas through cathartic icons. They produce images, with a powerful aesthetic climax, frozen in the moment of maximum gestural energy. All of them, then, make use of formal stratification, element which creates a distance from the most obious forms of realism. Ideally they add a series of glasses between our eye and the selected figure. They separated us from what is evident to recreate a sort of inner movement. Two of them realise it through out of focus images (Sabatti Bassini) or through cancellations on the old black and white (Grosso). The other two artists emphasise time flowing with a dynamism which is essentially more photographic (Bramante) or more stricly linked to video techniques (Tubi). They make the image dynamic so that its inner self expresses catharsis. In their works they capture gesture and manipulate it in several ways ahd what finally appeas is the synthesis of a human atmosphere. Physicalness counts but only if it includes psychic journeys and emotional states.
[...] Paola Sabatti Bassini has a sound idiosyncrasy for interrelations. She investigates private behaviors, personal stories, common people's everyday life. She performs it through videos, photographs, digital manipulations, printing on tent stitch canvas. Focus on various languages depends on the need of any single event. They have a sort of slowed down memory in common, the long time given by adding a subtracting procedures. Adding new elements or eliminating them, the artist penetrates deeply, with psychological ability. She particularly insists on out of focus images portaying a hightbrow dimension of the image. The artist clouds in order to make shadow areas come to the surface. She makes our look short-sighted to modify what we consider obvious. In her video 'Sguardando' she creates microstories on blurred backdrops. In the series 'Altrove' she reverses the frontal image and doubles it with out of focus techniques: a mechanism able to alter what normally passes unnoticed. This is the origin of printing on embroidery canvas. Naked boys sporting their erection are the subject of her works. Gay-like colour photos, which the artist snatches from their original context, look particularly cold but later aquire eroticism through a process of added memory. They break the easy vulgarity of pornography in their attempt to 'paint' the layer of apparence. [...]