It is a time without any interval, acceleration or pause – nuanced and lasting, it lies in the cold light of synthesis or in games of symbols and abstraction.

This fluid perpetuum, this ‘continuous present’ does not separate past and future, night and day or true and false, it insists and persists, blurring corners, passageways and stairs. Yet it is never resolved in a linear order – the eternal present of dreamlike activity falls into chaos, continually turning in on itself like a crazed vector.

Locating a point of departure, the direction of movement and the punctum of rest become the ultimate illusions.

Our fragments scatter and mix into the ether, they self-organise on slippery surfaces and plummet, before returning to the surface. These fragments have no name or age, and certainly no purpose.

The Continuous Present – The time of the ‘Self‘ who becomes the ‘other‘.

The Ego – the self – is dissolved through a miracle of literature, like those of art. The contemporary aesthetic, from dadaism to postmodernism, has merely collected the fruits of this dissolution wherein the poetic vocation is typified. Holderlin for example, who, even in the depths of his madness and the quiet claustrophobia of his prison-tower, continued to write verse – but came to forget his own name. At one point he began signing himself Scardanelli and took to false-dating his lyrics, submitting them with dates already passed. Then there was Fernando Pessoa, hostage to his famous heteronyms, born from deep within an existential, certainly non pathological, creative hysteria.  At the heart of writing lived with controversial passion, the many names of a self – endlessly multiplied, alternately hidden and revealed – took form, and voice.

Was Helmut Doppel mad when he marched towards the city of Halle following a perfectly straight trajectory, or a poet? Carefully avoiding corners, humanity continued its paradoxical journey along an infinite line and continued in defiance of Euclid and Descartes, to roll itself up in time and space.

In a recent project Canecapovolto has created an ambiguous character with a deliberate name. Doppel, meaning double in German, the man who fought the power of Magnetic North, the Rationalism of History and the dictatorship of compasses. Man with a non-name, a name open to its own opposite and offered up to self-loss, according to a situationist tendency to play a game of impossible maps. Identity is shed, history is erased and rewritten, the process glimpses the chaos that runs along the straight path. The goal is ultimately converted into utopia.

With Continuous Present, Canecapovolto and Zoltan Fazekas confront this uncertain pandemonium of contradictions and loss, using irony as an instrument to navigate the geography of the dream-state. The presence of the artist is paradoxically affirmed by their own disappearance behind an absurd variety of other names – other ‘selfs’, others of the self – which can then lead to exhibition.

It is a ‘schizoid-game’ with which to try, through un-maskings andcamoufflage, to weave together stories in a merging of imagination and reality, truth and artifice, the singular identity and otherness.

Federico Tonzi, Catherine Devi, Riccardo Buselli, Emanuele Torch, Gianni Silva. Five artists to whom the Ego can be entrusted, split into an identification chaos with a playful, ironic and light, yet at the same time, twisted taste. The threshold of ambiguity is thin and only fleshens out with misunderstanding and confusion. Who are these characters? What have they to do with the conceptualisers of the project? Are they alter egos, heteronyms, literary figures or dreamlike apparitions? Or simply colleagues, invited to exhibit at a show of which the Catania collective and the Hungarian photographer are directors? Or perhaps the truth lies somewhere between? Fragments of real life, lifted from memories or intimate relationships, are here merged with snippets of imaginary lives, in a collage which spirals into mystery.

Who these five characters in search of author are, is a question that will remain unanswered, to fix the meaning of the event. The works hung on the walls bear their name, and their authorship leaves no room for doubt. Yet other doubts hover, fed by the enigma of an unusual gallery of photographic portraits in black and white: are they the artists’ faces? And the names who buy the faces, all gives rise to a hundred thousand other stories.

The biographies of the artists are carefully revealed by sound art, a radiodrama in five parts which mixes cold cut documentary style and narrative raids in the form of theatrical adaptions. Everyday episodes, character observations, anagraphical hints – the play between false information and considered clues, between red herrings and suggestion, find their perfect mirror in the Canecapovolto poetic – used to practicing linguistic contamination, plagiarism techniques and perceptual manipulation, subliminal communication methods, the recycling of archive material and the spectacularisation of short-circuiting systems.

In 1973 Orson Welles made F for Fake, a fake documentary structured as a rebus that throws open false bottoms and knotted points of questioning. The work focuses on the figure of Elmyr De Hory, the great Hungarian artist-forger and specialist in postimpressionism, to whom the journalist Clifford Irving dedicated a biography (Fake!). Irving though, has gone down in history for another of his works, a biography of (false this time) Howard Hughes, aviation magnate and famous film producer, a figure cloaked in mystery and who Irving boasted of having known personally. It was a glaring lie, and was soon exposed. Welles suggests an interesting path with which to close the circle: it must have been De Hory, in freeing himself of debt with his biographer, who falsified the signature of Hughes on documents authorising the writer to publish the fake book. The plot is thickened until the spectator is confused, while a Welles-trickster proposes a disenchanted reflection on such themes such as (dis)identity, makeup and falsification – to which art, cinema and life are all inextricably linked.

Gilles Deleuze writes, in ‘The Time-Image’ with regard to the Welles of F for Fakes: “There is a nietzscheism about Welles, as if Welles were revising the main points of Nietzsche’s criticism of truth – the ‘real world’ does not exist and, if it did, would be inaccessible and inevocabile, and even if evocabile, useless and unnecessary. … Like Nietzsche, Welles never stopped fighting the system of judgement: there is no higher value to life, life should not be judged nor justified, life is innocent and has “the innocence of becoming” which is beyond good and evil.

This is something of what Canecapovolto and Fazekas would like to reiterate with their collaboration and research: that, through necessity and destiny, there is an aspect of art based on the expression of falsities, on the proliferation of the double, on the categorical imperative of doubt. Pushing the accelerator on this complex mechanism only serves to highlight (non)sense, amplifying the potential for both fear and amazement.