2008
EPIPHANIES
The latest work by the Ferrario Freres group represents a transition to a more innovative art medium that surpasses the limits of site-specific installation and prioritizes the event, aiming for the aesthetic constant that has distinguished the group in recent years: photography as the art of transduction towards the hidden worlds behind the descriptive order of reality.
The presence evolved from multifaceted chaos to arrive, passing through the inhuman visions of O.A., at an apparition where the crowd reflects itself in the desire to momentarily overcome the contingency of daily life that structures the poetics of this new work.
It takes the form of a happening organized via mailing aimed at internet users willing to participate in an event in the form of presence at a predetermined location. The presence entails possessing unifying formal elements: clothing, objects, hairstyles, skin color, etc.
The purpose of this presence revolves around a theme that will materialize in an apparition; the multitude, the human-mass-network, will reflect as a true icon in the photograph of the event. The descriptive data of reality remains the photograph as a documentary aimed at describing the personification in which the anxiety of the multitude is condensed; an epiphany that radiates as a simulacrum of the crowd.
Materials: digital prints on structures of plexiglass, polycarbonate, and steel
Happening: location to be defined
“The work I engage in has points of intersection with art since I am a researcher agrégé in paleontology. The shapes and colors, when preserved in the artifacts found, the aerial surveys highlighting the presence of anthropic traces now buried sometimes seem to be documentations of Land Art that I have seen in some museums during my free time or the plagiarism of enigmatic crop circles.
It surprises me that I am asked for an opinion on an artistic event of which, reluctantly, I have been a witness. A site in the Swiss Jura, a renowned land of faults and foldings of Fleysch and verrucani, immersed in the quadrature of the remains of a Riss-Würm encampment, a facies of extreme interest because of the cleavage between isotopic 5 and isotopic 6. Gradually, the site has filled with a crowd completely unrelated to the place, neither shepherds nor mountaineers, nor members of the excavation team.
They were there for an event that took shape in a man atop a ridge overlooking the site. In the sudden silence, this man raised his arms to the sky, gazed at the crowd, and there was a moment of empathy that lasted until his disappearance. By evening, everything had returned to the usual silence and solitude of work.
I recalled with emotion the first lesson in ethnopantology with the teacher entirely focused on a sacred gathering of Gravettian men under a rocky overhang where little was science… the rest was art to be told.”