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 “L’Homme 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 “L’Homme 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 Trevi’s 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 the”phenomena” 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 Fioretto’s 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