If you pause at any random moment of the day, in the street or at home, alone or among people, and say WAR, a dull explosion might extinguish the mind for a second, leaving you petrified. But a moment later, body and mind will already be fleeing, into the side alley or into the political analyses on TV, assailed by terror and by the foreboding of pain and misery. If you say WAR in English, perhaps instead a muffled sound might rise in the ears, a dry murmur accompanied by overlapping images from films and family anecdotes. Perhaps a slight tightening in the stomach would also arise, along with an amalgam of fears, memories, and disturbing smells, but not paralysis, and therefore not flight.
This disorder is, I believe, the ideal state in which to be touched at a deep level, and it is certainly the state I try to create in myself and in whoever observes my latest work, in this historical moment, poor in the most basic sensitivity, regressed and vulgar, in which one can no longer distinguish a genuine emotion from a simulated one, in which one demands to be provoked and “identifies” with the other to the point of their destruction.
If distance from the will to provoke, from fanatical Cancel-Culture-style polarization, and from the most fashionable progressive themes has been, from the outset, a hallmark of my work, the novelty in War lies in applying these same principles to a theme clearly suggested by current events.
The initial impulse is rooted in the conviction that society as a whole is today mutilated in its finer psychic functions. The habituation to the obscene sight of massacres and destruction irremediably compromises one’s relationship with others, with one’s own pain, and above all with the capacity to form an opinion and take a stance. An overwhelming sense of guilt and helplessness in the face of inhuman events increases, in many, a generic resentment and a desire to escape by retreating into small, concrete things, as if an excess of reality were paradoxically turning into abstraction. And yet, reality and the world must be cared for.
For these reasons, and with even greater conviction than in the past, I do not want to describe or narrate, but to synthesize and distill. I have carefully selected the feelings, impulses, and raw emotions to address in each piece, investigating the most intimate and minute among them, in the belief that the deeper one goes, the more explanatory connections are set aside, and the closer one comes to a psychic place shared by everyone, a matter that has always mattered greatly to me.
And the psyche in relation to the feeling of war is precisely the second field of inquiry in this work. If Hot War focuses on worldly, visible war, Cold War, in a mirrored way, shows fragments of the individual’s intimate universe, whose lacerations are imitations and models of external fractures. These are two worlds facing each other: the outer and inner landscape of the solitary, deformed individual confronting ruin, of which they are simultaneously perpetrator and victim.
In style, too, I have leaned toward a synthesis of forms. I have tried to assemble a minimalist visual alphabet, deliberately anti-photographic, made of bright primary colors, solid fields, and graphic patterns, leaving behind the high definition of photography, which nonetheless remains the base medium. All of this in an ongoing attempt to limit, as much as possible, the conceptualization of the images, favoring instead a more intuitive, unguarded observation. The project will consist of ten works arranged in a rectangular 1-4-1-4 scheme, and will not be a symbolic path but a concrete, ordered puzzle of fragments of reality and psyche violently torn from their integrity. If successful, it will encourage everyone to read themselves within the world not as a separate entity positioned according to the logics of wealth and power but, recovering an ancient way of seeing, as a life interconnected with others, whose “matter” separates it from the rest only to a negligible degree.
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