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TEXT
A painting that cohabits with death: the medium is the
image of the flesh.
Even in the artistic field, in recent years there
has been much talk about the body. Its nature has been seen
as a tortured object, as an organic or inorganic sexual image,
as an organ among organs, as an organism without organs, as
anatomy, as pictorialural dimensions, etc. But it
has not been said what the body really is in "our now"
-- what flesh really is -- how our sensibility moves in it,
how it was animated in history, and how it can be animated
again thanks to advanced technology.
Although painting is not properly equipped to answer these
questions through images, it offers a good anatomical table
where the forms and the topography of appearance can be dissected.
It is on this table that pieces of bodies, profiles, limbs,
joints are powerfully assembled and coupled. Just like Bataille,
who when beginning "Les Larmes d'Eros" starts writing
before photographic documentation of Chinese torture, comes
to the conclusion that the sighs in the sacrificial field
can often be confused with the endless digressions of Eros
and Sadism. We ourselves -- aided by Paul Verlaine's words
"La chair est sainte! Il faut qu'on la vénère"
-- discover the intensity of the pieces of a body coming from
a figure or from dispersed and illuminated anatomic forms.
Reading the two texts that Michael Leiris dedicated to the
English painter Francis Bacon, we note a definitive difference
between the notion introduced by Antonin Artroud "sur
la vérité cruauté" and the painting
of a "vérité criante." There should
not be much difference between the cry and the cruelty, especially
when we think that these two kinds of sensitivity have been
brought up in a similar atmosphere. A subtle difference though
remains and comes forward between the action of watching a
body on an anatomic table and the image of the flesh that
is found in a pictorial context used to discover it. Unlike
cruelty -- and therefore the scenic mastery where the flesh
appears torn, like in Herman Nitsch's actions -- the crying
or shouting painting seen by Leiris is something that regards
a quite voice hidden in the body movements, in the "figural"
(as Gilles DeLeuze calls it). Starting from this sensation
of silence, or rather of smothered cry, in Giovanni Fioretto's
paintings, the flesh finds a different image, a different
predisposition toward itself. The flesh remains a live and
luminous object because, although originating from an illustrative
passage of a corpse, through the pictorial energy the flesh
retains a luminosity which indicates symbolically an imperceptible
and transparent preservation of life.
Fioretto's idea is to bring onto the canvas the story of
decomposing flesh inspired by the old Neapolitan saying "simme
carne e maciello" (we are all slaughter-house flesh).
Such vernacular is very well used in Leo De Berardinis' theatre,
asserting that our presumptions lead us to wrongly believe
ourselves to be immortal, to deny that we are all metaphorically
the equivalent of little bites of meat, often with no potential
nor the good fortune to be displayed as the finest confection
of food for survival.
After the mapping of the genome, the great discoveries in
genetics, the arrival of a scientific renaissance flows into
the power of communication. Virtual and reproducible humans
are less concerned with the loss of the flesh. They are assured
of their prolificacy and hope that the conditions of unlimited
pro-creativity provides a vista without limits.
What can he who dwells in the minority of the pictorial arts
do? Perhaps he can dissect that screaming through a quiet
image, which is placed after the desperation of the body without
organs reconstructed by Bacon.
Fioretto carries out his mission this way: everything always
starts from a white surface. The first gestures happen at
the center of the canvas, aided by a large brush and a loose
weft. The strokes recall the oriental gestures of painting.
At the beginning they come very close to the pure and informal
and it is from here that the real process starts. The painter
dedicates to each stroke an interlude which admits details.
All gestures are contoured and gradually the pieces of clear
shapeless light, which have been at first simply discharged
onto the canvas, begin to work anatomically, trying to draw
a profile, a hip, an arm, half a neck, a nose and other body
parts for detail. These chromatic blocks, which soon begin
to appear as fleshy masses, revolve on their axes in the empty
space, they are their own mirror images and they move in a
tension which reflects their energy.
In some works, the onlooker can also catch a pictorial glimpse
on the side of the mass, which like windows, show a residual
chromatic work originating from one of the previous creative
layers. It is a light and successful way to direct the perspective
of the eye and to substantiate details without renouncing
the feeble memories hidden deep within the picture.
Unlike Bacon's dissected body, they start from the reconstruction
of mass that has a dual value for the artist: negative and
positive. Fioretto in fact defines these works as hypostasis
and ectopies, and marks them with the letters TNM and a progressive
number. Hypostasis, for their own culture, recall philosophical
referrals. Neoplatonism was a form of idealistic Monism, in
which the concept of perfect and perhaps unknowable Oneness
was considered the ultimate idea of the Universe. According
to the Neoplatonics, hypostasis where irradiations and emanations
of the Oneness, the farthest of which is the so-called "nous"
(pure intellect). Plotinus developed the idea of emanation;
he said that, starting from the Oneness, several substances
and levels of reality extended. According to him, light is
an emanation that expands from an inexhaustible luminous source.
Philon and Plotinus conceive, therefore, hypostatic forms
as "logos". Cirillus had to reclaim the "mother
of God" as the intimate and hypostatic union with the
divine nature; Christ would have become man through the blending
of the two natures. On the contrary the word "ectopy,"
sounds like a real abbreviation, as it basically means "very
little, almost nothing." The acronym TNM, which accompanies
these works by Fioretto, is drawn instead from medical terminology:
in Oncology it indicates the specificity and size of the mass
of tumor. The letters TNM stand respectively for Tumor, Regional
Lymph Nodes and Metastasis.
Put together, symbolically, the three definitions - hypostasis,
ectopy and TNM -- select a particular idea of the artistic
object, which is found in this case at the center of the canvas
as a chromatic mass, with its radiant and empty spots. The
image of the mass appears as an object severed from the body
and which, at the same time, spins on the monochromatic background
of the canvas. Also the colorful surface from which it departs,
appears like a new body, perhaps the unique body that art
can make available to the sight: the canvas. Bringing the
flesh onto his own "anatomic table," the painter
realizes that , it represents the minority attitude of painting.
Maybe, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, painting is only
minority. The painter starts from the reproduction of a "malignant"
image, to find in it full and empty spots. The full spot is
represented by light whereas the empty is implied through
the threat of the tumorous mass hidden in the image.
It has always been said that the artist, creating a work
of art, can not help but to express also the condition of
the discipline. Creating art indicates in itself a screening
on the state of art. Fioretto is therefore aware of the fact
that isotopes, after the contribution by holographic photography,
could have yielded more efficacious and spectacular results.
The simulation of TNM, with the help of digital reconstructive
technologies, would have been closer to a scientific reproduction.
The painter knows in the end that he has been surpassed by
technology, is aware of the fact that he has questioned both
the general value of the work of art and the centralizing
figure in his work, and often knows he is a small and unrecognizable
craftsman (philosopher). But it is in this very extreme condition
of minority, almost of impotence, that provides the best space
to build a theology of liberation; it is a kind of liberty
conquered using a means which is out of the present technological
time, but that tries to develop the untamed perception of
the savage dissociation of this "jetzt-zeit" (present
time). In Fioretto's emanation, pictorially, the digital means
is taken into consideration anyway, and has a speculative
function. This, though, is not enough to define the visual
reality of the tumor's mass, which is stronger and conveys
in itself an image that even in a simple painted reproduction
manages to maintain its impact.
I have told Fioretto several times that my favorite works
are his hypostasis TNM+4, TNM+6, or TNM+8, and TNM+9. In these
painting the mass comes the closest to an apex of organic/inorganic,
and no noses, teeth, profiles, mouths, etc., can be distinguished;
mainly the amount of matter holds in energetic form the substance
of its own emanation and of its own carnivorous tumorous spreading.
Also the sequences TNM+11, TNM+12, TNM+13, TNM+14, TNM+15,
and TNM+16 are particularly curious. Digging still deeper
in this succession, TNM+12 has achieved a degree of synthesis,
dryness and interior tension far more intense. Here color
and sinuous connection of the sign, moving towards the rigorously
contoured figure, reach homogeneity and strong harmonic form,
coming very close to the limit of tensional plasticity. This
image is not derived from the flesh mixture dispensed several
years ago by Mattia Moreni. It moves in harmony of color and
form which thickens the bodily mass, makes it lighter in the
image's effect, and subtly brings it back to the ambiguous
detail between the physical sign and the psychic dimensions
which evokes the afterlife of the corporal itself, what could
be defined as the persistent corporeality of evil.
It is inevitable that whoever looks at these features reflect
on the metastasis of the image itself. In our society of shopping,
the representation is now gangrened; the process which implies
and realizes the state of its communicative form is metastatic
and metastasis. The painter acts in minority to expose the
contradiction in a more clamorous way. The image is swallowed
by its own tumorous mass; it creates and destroys itself at
the same time; in itself it finds the empty and the full to
self-create and self-destruct. This may be the subtle and
hidden method that every form of communication uses to float
in present time. There can not be only a positive aspects
or only a negative aspects in this image. It is as if the
divine emanation of the hypostasis confounded itself with
the visionary changes of the tumorous mass. Good and evil
expand and concentrate organically in the form of the image.
What is left for the painter, since his action is entirely
concentrated on the mediation of the canvas? We can say that
he, like mystics, who where far from the rigid ecclesiastic
rules, contemplates and invites to look at the consumption
of the flesh keeping away from using or eating it. Flesh is
mainly composed of muscular fibers and a variable quantity
of fat and connective tissue. The painting instead reproduces
only the image -- and often only the exterior -- of this concreteness,
deleting details, the lines of the fibers and the porosity
of the tissues. The painter, urged by the gift of synthesis,
reduces, dilutes in a symbol the fragments of life which tie
themselves with the double thread of energy and of death.
Only an ambiguous visual agent is left of them, doubtful to
have not understood exactly what lies ahead for us, we act
like the irritated swelling of our body produced by the sting
of a honey bee stuck in our flesh of us victims of a global
voyeurism.
Gabriele Perretta
Between 1993 and 1996 the Artist introduced LHomme
écorché(The Skinned Man), a decomposed
human figure. The painting starts anatomically and metamorphosis
into an entanglement of forms that suggest a labyrinth; a
magic trip beginning not only in the body but also in the
psyche. His painting from the Ipostasi series
detaches itself from realism, with suggestions of Francis
Bacon and the inner-gut, in a dream like quality. The human
face reduces itself into a twisted shapeless mask similar
to a chrysalis, which emerges from its mass in aerodynamic
lines which represent the restlessness of the unconscious.
Gabriele Turola
The work of Giovanni Fioretto always has a figurative or descriptive
title, suggesting the nature of the piece.For example LHomme
écorché (The Skinned Man) is the title
of a 1996 exhibition presented by the Institute of French
Culture in Naples.
In 1997 he presented at Trevis Flash Museum a biannual
project Ipostasi which was the installation of
a plastic, and a demo video. This piece and a later piece
Ectopie share the common thematic thread of a
red background. Both pieces depict isolated organs that exceed
the confines of an invisible body. Thus, by evading limits
and contrasted with the large monochromatic canvas, the elements
appear to atrophy and we get the impression of rough bones.
Erri de Luca(originally from Naples, like Giovanni Fioretto)
writes No one can escape the ravages of time These
organs and bones that rotate within the space
of ones imagination are nothing but a figure showing the visible
signs of the unchangeable substance that remains under the
appearance of a phenomenon. In his strong invisible screen
graphics the artist is well aware of the reality of the human
mask. Scaling the representation of a face, or a body the
concept of thephenomena that is changeable with
the flow of time, here the figure is moving, it empties itself,
rotates on itself, it animates the interior while externally
it decomposes.
Behind all of this is the ipostasi,the essence
of the the Skinned Man. In some chromatic tones
from the warm palette one first sees Ochre and light red.
Through the opacity of the figure and its movement in space
one can see Giovanni Fiorettos imaginative work is reminiscent
of the clear objectivity in the works of Francis Bacon. A
painting that does not exclude the tragedy of itself, in which
chaotic reality supersedes the visible from the darkness,
and the silence excels into first place.
Camilla Ugolini Mecca
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