From 24 to 27 January it goes on stage Arte Fiera Bologna, one of the main European fairs of modern and contemporary art. The Ligurian artist will also participate in the Emilian exhibition Silvia Celeste Calcagno, class of '74, as usual presented by its reference Gallery PH – Neutro with offices in Verona and Pietrasanta (www.ph-neutro.com).
Silvia Celeste Calcagno makes the antithesis the key to her poetics. The contents of his works, performative installations, contain the dichotomy: beauty and pain, carnality and soul, blood and thought. In an obsessive photographic reproduction of herself, Silvia Celeste Calcagno talks about life through death; of sleep through nightmare; of pain throughout the body. Looking for and getting lost in the same image of her reflection.
He writes about her the Turin art critic Luca Beatrice: “When in 1976 Francesca Woodman, at the age of just 16, asked the operator to cut her head out of the shot of the scene, she had already guessed the pattern: the artist/performer must fade into the lens, disappear and then show herself. The naked body, stigmatized by visual effects of simultaneity, shadows and movement, accentuates its fragility, fragmented and decomposed”.
“The practice of portraying oneself using one's body as raw material is common to many artists, from the first videos made by Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci, at the beginning of their respective careers in the late XNUMXs, and to the modus operandi of female artists and performers who in the over the following decade they found in self-representation the way to convey messages of denunciation but also cries of inner pain, from Gina Pane to Marina Abramovic. Silvia Celeste Calcagno also chooses to "use herself" as a subject; not so much for a narcissistic pleasure of leavening the ego – a trap into which so many fall – rather to better control the direction of the actions he stages. It's not about herself that she wants to talk about, she doesn't care much.
His are representations of emotional states, where presence is given for absence, emptiness is found in fullness and life is continually alternating with a profound sense of death. The rule of opposites applies. The body is at the center: fixed camera, repeated actions, almost an obsession that can last for hours, days. The result is a – literal – wall made up of hundreds of shots, almost coincident, interspersed only by the breath of the first click with the next. These are what Silvia Celeste Calcagno defines as "observations", in the manner of Gina Pane who considered the work, properly speaking, the photographic documentation and not the actual development of the performance, or rather the "constat photographique". Silvia Celeste's work follows a process of perpetuation of the image in stoneware tiles on which the impression corrodes, consumes and compresses the lightness of the shot in the final result similar to dated and neo-romantic postcards.
The movement already contained in each single frame is, in the overall view, a photographic sequence that recalls the studies of the book "Animal Locomotion" by Eadweard Muybridge when in 1887 it conquered the vast public, more voyeuristic, than the scientific elite to which should have addressed. The development of composite ceramic panels on the walls, together with the series of photographs, suggests a movement beyond that of the isolated photogram in the installations of the artist residing in Albissola, the historic center of Italian ceramics. In the global vision, the narration becomes more articulated and finds its definition in mini-videos and audio interventions that accompany the puzzle to close it. Scientific, certainly not bucolic, is the creative practice of Silvia Celeste Calcagno who has a past as a professional ceramist and has acquired the experience of the masters to support the peculiarity of the hand”.
“Attesa is always about Waiting in the homonymous video by Silvia Celeste Calcagno lost among an indefinite number of sleeping and fluctuating Ophelias. Last performance of white swans leaving the spotlight on the empty stage. “Goodnight Ladies” Lou Reed would sing. Thus, the formal sensuality of a mouth in the foreground which deforms – Stare – under the action of the hands of a second actor, diverts the erotic attention towards a perverse and artificial excitement. “The sex appeal of the inorganic” (Mario Perniola, 1994) does not look at beauty but at the sadistic and masochistic use of the body like machines whose potential, virtual, can be abused without filters.
Stare is synonymous with a degenerative state of communication, it is the impossibility of reacting, the passive condition of a dialogue for a single actor. But it is the technique that places Silvia Celeste's works in an experimental frame that amplifies the powers of the medium. The use of photography is a pretext, an observation of a final result that transforms the initial image into its archetype. The transfer onto stoneware at 1250 degrees centigrade saturates the contrasts and burns the luminosity of the blacks and whites. They look like digital interventions of alterations of chromatic curves, the formal evolution of materiality. The practice solves the equation between craftsmanship and contemporary. Experimental photoceramics, skilful in the result made unique by the artist's conquest of a technique that can never be repeated in numerical editions, as would happen with photography, infinitely duplicable.
The image can be repeated but each copy is unpredictable and altered (according to copyright law) 70% from the original. The technical trick to escape from the "reproducibility of the work of art" (Walter Benjamin, 1955) and from the "copy" in the strict sense, is in vogue among the exponents of yBa, the companions of the Saatchi stable. Mat Collishaw has found the same rule adopted by Silvia Calcagno to be successful: impressions of images on many ceramic tiles which fragment the image, as in Chuck Close's paintings, into an incalculable number of pixels as digital photography would require. Iconic archeology is contaminated with the aesthetics imposed by contemporary media and craftsmanship becomes an expedient to preserve the artistic unicum category.”
