/ Cover: Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog
By Claudia Andreotta
Giusi Lorelli’s approach to art inevitably arises from a doubt: the undeniable attractive power of her works erupts with the inevitable question, “Painting? Photography?” Thus the “zero step” toward the vortex of the indeterminate is accomplished, in a cosmos that fuses baroque, violent suggestions, dense with emotional tensions, transfigured into a rarefied yet lucid poetry. This is not, however, a journey toward other worlds, but a total immersion in the primal agonistic condition of humankind: the confrontation with the multiform, terrifying “challenger” in the eternal struggle toward self-awareness. The highly controlled use of technical and linguistic means, free of emphasis or rhetoric, leads along a path toward the unknowable: not an aimless wandering, but a genuine route set in the exact direction of a faint glimmer, a “preview” of the true self beyond the darkness. A persistent inquiry into the archetypal questions inherent in humanity, which never finds an answer either in the Enlightenment illusion of sovereign rationality or in the numbing evasion of mystical surrender. The questions raised, also prompted by intimately personal experiences, are stripped of every individual element to be transposed into universality, into an undeferrable urgency to question oneself. Rivoluzionario passo zero, an emblematic title encapsulating the sense and meaning of the artist’s most recent works (2014-2018), faced with the collapse of certainties, chooses to struggle with the unknown, aware of wanting to live a destabilizing experience in search of the self, yet unable to foresee the shape of the danger to which she chooses to expose herself.
Giusi Lorelli portrays the suspended moment, the “zero step” preceding the start of the battle, making palpable the emotional vibration of a situation whose victorious outcome is not a given. The viewer, too, must pause, setting aside all prior knowledge: the very language of these works is in fact “revolutionary,” often carrying meanings opposite to classical iconography. And if the initial doubt resolves in favor of photography, an unresolved feeling remains at the interpretive level: the recovery of the personal dimension of existence is an unrepeatable act, occurring in a different way for every individual. The artist points to the only viable itinerary but cannot provide directions: certain the route, certain the destination, (un)certain the nature of the journey into the soul.
© Claudia Andreotta, Giusi Lorelli. Tutti i diritti riservati.