a text by Salvatore Davì
17 Dicember 2015 – 27 February 2016
Domenico Bianchi
Bruno Ceccobelli
Paolo Grassino
Concetta Modica
Liliana Moro
Ignazio Mortellaro
Luca Pancrazzi
Alessandro Piangiamore
Loredana Sperini
Michele Tiberio
Vincenzo Schillaci
Francesco Surdi
Luca Trevisani
Chen Zhen
Wax in artistic production has an ancient and incomplete history; its employment is documented since fifth millennium b.C. and from that time the physiological conditions of its production remained the same. But, in 1911, the historian Julius von Schlosser dedicated an entire paper on this subject: History of Portraiture in wax, a very innovative text, because of the absence of ceroplastics studies before 1911; sources only conduct toward a few anecdotes, some notes and brief historical hints, which actually get lost in the lack of specific texts chasm. We can find some information in classical essays, in middle-age recipe books and in some Renaissance and seventeenth century contracts, from which we can deduce the customer and the author. The history of this technique was so frail and fragmented until the end of the nineteenth century, that might seem unlikely that they have reached us.
With his WAX project, Francesco Pantaleone Contemporary Art Gallery wants to experiment, according to wax ductility, a melting point which allows to shape a new comparison between ancient and contemporary. So, wax portraits of aristocratic ladies and gentlemen of the nineteenth century, and polychrome votive wax, all of these coming from private collections and made by anonymous artists, are combined with the caustic fragility of Liliana Moro’s waxes and Concetta Modica’s sharp composition, leading to a conceptual way toward the deeply materic and spatial surfaces of Luca Trevisani and Domenico Bianchi’s artworks, artists whose work becomes the symbol of a bipolar element which represents a social gauge for the aesthetical and figurative vicissitudes and a measure to come back to a pure conceptual matter.
Bruno Ceccobelli’s Vanitas is presented as a relief which oversteps the two-dimensional nature of a mirror covered in wax; a work that syntetizes the vision of a memento mori and envelops the gaze of those who are on the other side of the mirror.
The esoteric twist of Loredana Sperini’s polychrom hands and the structural concavity of Chen Zhen’s work are in tune with those of the ancient artisans of the eigteenth century, such as Anna Fortino and Gaetano Zumbo (ancient sicilian wax-artist of the XVII, who worked in Tuscany and even in the Parisian courts), both sicilian masters passed into the annals of history. The same ancient artisans Luca Pancrazi’s little withe wax cameos are related to ar works that seem molds of Imagination, a very symblic image that becomes specular to itself, as it happens to all the aristocratic wax portraits, which are mold of a so much true and objective reality, to be considered as a doppelgänger. The hyperbole of the comparison between ancient and contemporary goes on toward unexpected paths; that is why the renewed use of the conceptual matter in Luca Trevisani’s work takes place with the help of mimèsi, one of the most prominent feature of wax. The concept of naturalistic representation is, as we have already said, deeply rooted in ceroplastic works. In Paolo Grassino, Ignazio Mortellaro and Francesco Surdi’s works, wax seems to recapture the sense of shapes and the original meaning of matter, with an instant rocky vision that looks at the world for the very first time, using wax as a flash camera to create a snap-shot of a simultaneous reality. Wax seems to represent nature in order to give it back to eternity or to destroy it instantly. Vincenzo Schillaci and Nicola Pecoraro materic surfaces don’t seem to represent anymore the symbol of the interrupted pleasure by a raw similarity, but they are a kind of alchemic refinement of reality. The real sense of Michele Tiberio’s work is a primary gaze, that works as an enzyme looking for a new synthesis and it displays the shapes of the chemical process, emulsifying the wax surface as it was a phase change, a condensation or a sublimation. And the same process seems to be shown in Alessandro Piangiamone’s work that reaches, with a mocking intangibility, an intense spatial depth, in which the eye is lost and the time is osmotically absorbed.
These technical processes are still alive, and they let us feel their breath in the honeycomb of our contemporary age, through sensitive artists that are searching for new spaces as a shelter for today myths, or as a place where they just try to tell a truth. For these reason WAX, a project born inside Francesco Pantaleone Contemporary Art Gallery wants to be an incitement for new and deeper studies and it confirms the importance of suggesting a comparison between ancient waxes and contemporary wax artworks, in order to create an accurate visual investigation upon a matter that deserves much more attention.
(www.fpac.it/site/wax)
