EXPLOSIONS#8/SWEETS
09 > 10.2006
Science and patience
the torment is certain.
(Arthur Rimbaud)
The human works, things (naturalia and artificialia, without distinction), cultural systems, because of vocation, loose their specificity. That happens in a long or brief time, suddenly or developing, with a voluntary act or because of relapse effects: everything belongs to the received world is liable to the transformation of its own singularity in something else. The symbol, created by the community around objective values gets historicized in a reflection that involves the idea of identity. The tangible reality gets in combination with the verbal dimension assigned by human trusts, and is thanking to this aptitude for ‘decadence’ that the cultures ere evolving.
Loredana Longo has a deep knowledge – passionate and nearly painful – of the human things, of their names and the relations mingled around them. The explosions carried out in different places, inserted in a plan that provides an epilogue like twilight of gods, are the synthesis of a search developed in different levels, the artist ran the risk personally, her physical ness, her relation with reality. The aesthetics of destruction (this is the title of a recent show of the artist) is a cognitive journey, a moral search before than formal that belongs since long time to Longo. The project ‘explosions’ can be read as the dissolution of a tension overloaded by the personal and artistic vicissitudes of Loredana and of the recent world history.
Actually, is inevitable that the world chronicle influences our habits, the daily life, the proxemics relation with the other people and with the public and private spaces; in the same way, on a deeper level, comes true an upsetting of the perceptive conventions. The artists – always keeping balance between precariousness of their interior regime and the world of common customs – become the authors of the ethical and aesthetic lexicon necessary to interpret the world of all the ‘day after’, big and small.
In this perspective are situated the progressive explosions of Loredana Longo, that blows up part of houses, glimpses of domestic quiet, and joyful religious altars of family recurrences. The exploding home, devastating places and symbols of reassuring continuity, represents a dramatic identification with the artist’s body. Going over the time of body performance, Longo removes the identification of her own role and passion in a different participation: conducting (hardly) detached the direction that sees other holocausts, not the flesh one, ending on the art scenes.
The explosions are sublimation, not too hidden, of a suicide, the same that other artists daily do looking for an individual or collective redemption. The sacrifice comprises two possible declensions: the self-destruction and the alienation of a beloved object (a person, a city).
n both cases is realized a narcissistic stand taking, an invasion – of oneself or other.
The home, then, is a metonymic extension of the body, of its periphery, of its measure and of its net of visible phenomenon with which the body connotes the home.
Longo has been always working on this perception of body and of its pellicles which become identity’s subsequent containers; now, in the beloved and careful set design of rooms condemned to destruction, continues to describe herself, her Sicily, costumes and tradition of her land (is a nostalgic universe of the gattopardo divinities, her baroque world has one eye open on the life and one on the death.
When the deflagration devastates everything, creating a real shock, the material sustains a quick and irreversible transformation: the loss of its physical and formal features, the ones that get recognizable objects and people. Loredana Longo faces the destruction of this balance as a catastrophe, in a literal meaning, where the term means overturning, and is devoid of the currently attributed radicalism.
The artist proceeds in fact to the reconstruction, necessarily partial, that produces the grotesque, romantic and dramatic result of a ruins scenery. It’s an ancestral act, more than it seems to be, because in only one object are joined the image of the woman that calms and mitigates (an historical idea of femininity) and the one that primes the disaster (a mythological and totemic vision). In the crowding of past and present myths seeps at last the final doubt: the one about the truth of visible realty. The representation of the simple nature of the things is divided: the object is present and touchable in its actual reconstructed condition but it’s still in the video sequence; here the object is still integral clearly expressing the image that makes it recognizable.
Pietro Gaglianò
agosto 2006 – Stromboli
