from April 22, 2016 to June 22, 2016
curated by Valentina Bruschi
(texts by Valentina Bruschi and Zineb El Rhazoui)
In June 1942, André Breton officially launched Surrealism Overseas, together with other European artists in exile who were fleeing the violence of the Second World War, with the publication of the first issue of the magazine VVV in New York. The three Vs in the title of the magazine stood for Victory, View and Veil, all nouns through which Breton intended to communicate the “Victory over the forces of regression, the View around us and inside us, the myth in process of formation beneath the Veil of happenings1.” Today some issues of the magazine are kept at the MoMA and document how the authors had foreseen the horrors of the Second World War, after those suffered during the First. The V for victory desired by Breton also meant the word “vote” to him, the desire and commitment to reform the world through the values of freedom and humanism. Although Surrealism did not succeed in revolutionizing society in a concrete way, the intellectuals of this movement had a fruitful impact on following generations through the liberating and subversive power of art and culture.
Loredana Longo makes no direct reference to Breton’s publication, but in her sensitivity as an artist one can feel its influence, when she chooses the word “Victory” as the title for a series of new works of her fourth individual exhibition at Galleria Francesco Pantaleone in Palermo. They are large sheets of fine velvet on which the artist works slowly, using the flame of an electric welder, creating burns which – by subtracting matter – draw landscapes of destruction (Aleppo and Palmira) and tall walls of separation (Melilla). These are images that the media show us every day. The result is a series of tapestries on which the word “Victory” stands out. It appears throughout the exhibition in the set of letters that make up a sculpture in green Guatemala marble. The same word doubled, replicated using various media, is printed with fire (on tapestries) or fragmented, struck by a hammer (sculpture).
“Victory” is a word that contradicts itself at the very moment you say it,” says the artist. “One person’s victory is always someone else’s defeat. Behind a victory there is always pain, be it a sports victory or a military victory. Someone has suffered for it.” Therefore, a definition understood here as an enantiodrome, whose meaning, once inserted in the context, takes a direction opposite to the original one.
We wonder, rereading Susan Sontag, what is “the appearance that war takes on when seen from afar, in the form of image. The victims, the grieving relatives, news consumers – every one of them has his or her own vicinity or distance from war.”2 And yet, “in the era of photography one always expects more from reality. The real event may not be frightening enough, and therefore should be amplified, or reinterpreted in a more convincing way.”3 Loredana Longo reprocesses the photographic images she uses as the starting point for her tapestries, through her unique language, using what she herself called the “aesthetics of destruction” a few years ago. A definition for her work, started with the series Explosions, that uses gunpowder to blow up objects tied to the fetishes of the middle-class family: Christmas dinner, the bedroom of married couples, the wedding feast. These scenarios of family life are then “partially restored” by the artist who reassembles the pieces into a new formal balance, moving from destruction to reconstruction, as documented by videos and photographs. The domestic environment, which is the most private of all spaces, becomes a universal model of social relations.
Since 2011 the focus of her research had shifted from the family to the emergencies of our times, such as the drama of migration in the Mediterranean, which has become one of the recurring themes of her latest works. The result is a corpus of works of denunciation—from the carpets of Place/No Place, with the quotes of the world’s most powerful people burned on them, to the performances My Own War and Tu primo a sorgere (You first to rise)—which all have a strong ethical inspiration. These works aim to stigmatize passiveness and the addiction to violence. The artist does not scream: she burns. There is a continuous search for a balance in the control of the unforeseeable behavior of fire and the combustion of materials that become a painful and tiring drawing instrument. The subjects chosen for the tapestries are images that have become icons of our recent history: moments of tensions, often linked to explosions, but not only. They are especially images that represent moments of defeats/victories of one part of humanity over the other. From the bombings of the war in Syria – exhibited in the works Aleppo and Palmira – to the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, from the craters in the asphalt of the attacks against the judges Falcone and Borsellino to the barbed wire fences that are being raised along the borders of Eastern Europe, as already done in Ceuta and Melilla, in North Africa. These works are reminiscent of the memento mori of antiquity and drive the observer to deeply think about the reality that surrounds us.
The use of the cloth for the tapestries is an element that often returns in Longo’s works, a familiar and female tradition, visible in the seams of the clothes of her first performances in Catania, and that is recovered in this exhibition for which she has created a great site-specific installation, encompassing of all of the works on display. It consists in a carpet of military blankets that covers the floor on which the public is invited to walk. It is a glimpse of the color of the earth that recalls the refugee camps and hospitals. The woolen and felt blankets, rendered unusable, are a reference to those of the multi-talented German artist Joseph Beuys, whose ethical message is “We are the revolution.” Cut by the artist and then sewn together again in some points, they do not provide any protection. The verses of Eugenio Montale come back to mind when he speaks of the nonsense of war to which artists and intellectuals cannot give consolatory answers: “Do not ask us for the word to frame our shapeless spirit on all sides and blaze it in letters of fire, to shine like a lost crocus in a dusty plain.”4
The exhibition itinerary is summarized in the most intimist of the works, Sorry, an installation of screens that feature a gray side and the other covered with bright gold-colored wallpaper. It is a piece of furniture for dividing spaces in middle-class homes, which marked the starting point for the artist’s research over ten years ago. It is a symbolic wall that refers to all the walls that have been raised in history to divide peoples and around which a person can be born by chance on one side or the other. The more intimate and precious side of the wall is the golden one on which the artist has designed a wallpaper with a pattern that recalls art nouveau decorations. If you look carefully, you can trace the word “sorry,” repeated countless times, to the point of blending into the pattern. This word evokes the sense of the last verse of Eugenio Montale’s poem where he claims the ethical tension that must inspire authentic poetry: if it is no longer possible to tell one’s own world in a comprehensible way, it is the duty of the poet to declare with a sharp and conscious mind: “This, today, is all that we can tell you, what we are not, what we do not want.”5
