Rivoluzionario passo zero

RIVOLUZIONARIO PASSO ZERO (Revolutionary zero step) is the name of the collection bringing together works produced between 2014 and 2018, marking the conclusion of a first phase of research. Reflecting in hindsight on the works and on the lived experience they distill, I believe the common thread linking them can be defined as a progressive abandonment of positions. Secure but dangerously fixed positions are left behind, work after work, in favor of the intuition of a fluid way of being within reality, welcoming its uncertainty, risk, and horror as living matter to be forged. With the role of current events or news reporting falling away as the central reference point of inquiry, what emerged instead were those timeless antecedents that lie at the bottom of everyone’s soul and that, settling and accumulating over time, release a clear and therefore deeply revolutionary gaze on things, far from the traps into which the angry agitator, the fanatic, and the simply deluded fall.

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TWINS: THE MALE AND THE FEMALE
Of the two twins portrayed in the work, only one exists in ordinary reality; the other is an intuition, the suspicion of a lost unity, perhaps a dream. Seeing them together, for once, is a discovery. The work focuses on the intimate, pulsing relationship between the buried and the emerged part of reality. Although the former is lost to sight, whether by accidental choice or perhaps by precise intent, their dialogue is alive and in some way holds the solution to the enigma of life.

ACCEPT THE GIFT
The work speaks of the profound drama connected to the total acceptance of oneself. A female figure generously offers herself to the gaze, but an obstacle, the knife, draws the observer’s attention, who ends up watching themselves watching. Accepting the gift would instead entail the opposite, that is, making the immense effort of casting one’s gaze further ahead. It does not mean being indulgent with oneself. Rather, it means setting oneself in motion toward a radical transformation that brings the two extremes of the self to touch. Only in this sense is it possible to give oneself the real opportunity to be rich.

CROSSING THE GOBI
In an old interview, Jodorowsky said of Castaneda’s tales: if it’s a deception, it’s a sacred deception. Indeed, a story that is not poetic is merely a chronicle that leaves out all that is incommunicable and therefore deepest and most essential. Sacred deception is the true protagonist of Crossing the Gobi, which draws on a passage from Gurdjieff’s book Meetings with Remarkable Men, in whose mask the impossible, the real, and the unrealistic meet to the point of coinciding, opening the way to the intuition of new, profound truths.

THE DUKE D’AUGE STEPS OUT OF HISTORY
The Duke d’Auge is the protagonist of Raymond Queneau’s novel The Blue Flowers. Untamable and hyperactive, what enchants in him is the antihistorical quality of his continuous action, entirely disconnected from any modern idea of progress. His way of being is of a wisdom-bearing nature, one in which the past and history are not places for reaffirming the pride and identity of an individual or of an entire civilization, but for tracing, in the depths of memory, a truth about one’s being in the world.

CATALINA AMONG THE DAMNED
Catalina is an imagined figure, half human and half divine. A being of transition. Freakish in appearance, her chest protected by a golden breastplate, she is separated from the ordinary world by wealth understood as a condition of being. Around her drags a humanity lost through laziness, complaint, corruption, and cowardice. The work is freely inspired by Felix Nussbaum’s painting The Damned.

SHAITAN KEEPS THE WELL COVERED
In all Western esoteric traditions, as well as in shamanic cultures far from the Mediterranean, Shaitan — that is, Satan, the Challenger — is an inner human impulse, the “antithetical element,” a “force of negation” that opposes the risk inherent in evolution. A kind of guardian of the abyss of the personality, fierce keeper of the survival instinct. Shaitan must be tamed. Being incapable of doing so is what can be thought of as Evil.

EVE OF THE RETURN
Faith without discernment (the pope behind the curtain) is the first enemy encountered by those who set out in search of the Origin. It is met over years of traveling certain distances in depth, but recognition occurs in a single, precise moment, coinciding with some exceptional event. If one then chooses to evade it, one is fortunate. This may cause bitterness, but also the need to turn back and bring the fruits (puzzle, padlock, and stitch) of that stretch of the path. The return is not a failure. One must know how to dwell in every place.

MARIA MANDINGA
Freely inspired by the protagonist of García Márquez’s novel Of Love and Other Demons, Maria embodies qualities belonging to mythic heroes: strength, pride, purity of intent, courage, and impenetrability.