Project

Verismo Magico, a project by  Sergio Risaliti, will inaugurate on Monday September 18,  at the NOTgallery of Naples. Video, photographic and painted works of Yi Zhou and T-yong Chung will be showed. The two artists will be presented together for the first time with the ambition to disarticulate the so-called "objective fact", what can be considered sublime result of the positivist ideology. The deceit of positivist science and the materialistic philosophy.

The works of the two artists answer both (each in its own way) the eternal necessity of a wonderful and wondering art, that is an art born to twist the documentation of daily life, the habitual perspective of being objective, the sureness and measurableness of Euclidean geometry, the irreversible and invalicabile linearity of the historical time.

Title it, topics and traces

The title set and upset two stylistic categories that usually are antithetic: The category of "Verismo" and that one of "magical". The cue is given By the "Magical Realism", the artistic movement of the beginning of Italian Twentyth century, born in counter-offensive to some results of mitteleuropean expressionism. Born from the rib of the "Metafisica", the "Magical Realism", wanted to alterate the mimesis using an iperrealism that was keeped within the limits of aberration and absurdity. The psychological purpose of this movement was to give back, in traumatic way, the image of the truth reflected in conscience that always lives distressed or scared. A truth that in the works of "Magical realism appears reflected in the deforming mirrors of conscience flow, that is in that zone of encounter of real life - that it is always tragic, comic, sublime, atrocious- with the conscience - that always it is shocked and traumatic-. A conscious  and visionary condition in which the subject, watching itself or watching around, is able to test or perceive what is perturbing. It is so obvious that the "Magical Realism" was born in order to take away the positivistic trust in truth, considered like an objective recognizable data through technology and science. A scientifically recognizable truth, and technologically checked, that already then was extended to things, goods, psyche, emotions and what was inexpressible.

In occasion of this Neapolitan show, the word exchange - "Realism" in "Verismo"- happens also to do homage to the culture of the south: becouse here, in the south, the "Verismo" was a prosperous season of literary and artistic masterpieces.

Finally it can't be avoided the debt contracted from every realism (magical or nouveaux that it is) to the truth of  Caravaggio painting. An heavenly realism that was correctly read by the critic Roberto Longhi and the poet Pier Paolo Pasolini, who discarded materialistic and idealistic hypotheses, understanding that a clear madness was hidden in the mimetic evidence of the truth painter; a madness that,  lacking in any romanticism or idealism, was of mystical and metaphysical nature. A work in art, using  truth magic, that now appears neo-platonic: it is able to transform the mere daily life into an absolute, ideal, becouse timeless and always actual. In other words the realism of Caravaggio appears as a language of bodies, gestures, objects petrified in the mirror of the painting,where flesh becomes figurative image and theatre a representation of metaphysical figurativity. Such a magical and perturbing truth true therefore magical and therefore disturbing has been programmaticly exemplified in a myth of Narcissus, where the "double", the "identical", for a sort of figurative "onomatopeism", capture the "Oneself" dragging it in a magical ipereal world.

In the heveanly realism of Caravaggio the "tableuax" is "vivant" for magic work, and the "living" is magically (becouse of a supplement of genius) put in sitting in order to disappear of all (but only after fast exposure to a night lamp) in the specular double of the figurative identity. This apparition of truth is so metaphysical to scare and to deceive, to amaze and to surprise who contemplates it for a long time. It is also a dizzy epifany of a figurativity copletely realistic and horizontal. In parallel with those tests of logical and linguistic peripetias that much success had in poetry and in theatre during 1600's.

"Verismo Magico" has to be red like escape from the objectivity and like negation of objective facts. It is a project that is intentionally born with anachronistic intentions, in order to say that there is still space for art magic, in a time of dissemination of media, of true reports, of reality-tv, of computer science and iper technological realism. the attempt is to answer with art to technique and science that, until contrary test, seem to have the full control of truth.

"men can imagine more things than they are able to think" Gaston Bachelard asserted, and then he asked himself: "What the poet of images can see where we see only truth? ". "Poets",  he said,  "use some expressions that exceed their thought, that exceed  our thought. They perforate the truth with their deep eye: so exceeding truth, they can approach to a universe of archetypes ". For the French philosopher the universe of the poetic imaginary coincided with the universe of the iper-realism of the imagination. "A realism that can exceed the appearances; a realism that wants to possess the world, in its substantial elements, and to follow it in its deeper dynamics". The art language, it seems to say Bachelard, is a poetica ontology. For this reason it can communicate to us through emotions, heart and spirit. As a matter of fact image sounds, breathes, shines and seems to come back from far away, after it has completed a voyage through time and space. W. Benjamin in  "his Passages" has written that: "NOW is the most intimate image intimate of WHAT has been.". So, Some images bring back us NOW to the place of eternal present, in that past that always lives again of resemblances and reminiscences.

Artists, works

The daily objects reproduced by T-Yong Chung - either they are a sewing-machine, a coffee pot, a pair of scissors, or anything else- they are always object-ghost. And for this reason we'll call them "phantasmatic". They are immaterial shapes, inserted into a world where  matter is consumed in order to be similar to what is more ethereal or aerial: clouds and flames, smoke, cirri, exhalations, ignes fatuii, that go up between earth and sky, in the middle of pure concreteness and inconceivable unreality. These tools, that absolutely precede truth, or orphans of truth, come out emerging from what seems a dark night. Their substance is recognizable on the black surface and, as though it happens in an epiphany of superfaces and shapes that precede the color, they rise thanks to an emanation of breeze. But they are not radiographes of object-goods taken at the moment of an atomic apocalypse. The world of T-Yong Chung is a breeze and lightness world: lightness of being and suspension of being alive. Where, as in the ocean abysses, or in the heavenly ones, it is possible to live only of light and irradition. Where there is not difference between soul and body, between real life and fable; where things, or the impression of tools, appear remembered or dreammed, fantasticated or imagined. We are at twenty thousands leagues under the seas, between the folds of neuronal thresholds and we move towards the universe limits. For hallucination or epiphany, the tools painted by T-Yong fray in front of our eyes like some dreams during the morning. But the dawn is dark here. The space is lamp-black.

Yi Zhou considers truth as an enigma, an oracle dimension where things speak for reverie. A day-dream whose archetypal truth we must decipher. Yi Zhou watches the life like a myth scene, and for this reason mithologies, and archaic figures, together with symbols of sacred science and with iconographies of Middle Ages or Reinassance, often return like alarming and mysterious informations. Yi Zhou considers magic as the character of truth that seems to structure like memory or dream. The past, which every figure alludes to, is remote experience whose conceptual force is always present; the present image is then something that returns and emerges from far away, something of fundamental that has travelled through time and space. Because, like myth images, these are founding both in metaphysical and anthropological sense. deep-rooted into a prehistory of imagination and of experience they have accompanied rituals and customs, uses and behaviors, also in order to  give meanong to the perception of over-humane or cruel forces.

And then some images return as well as archetypes do: that is going back from a remote time, from that prehistory of the conscience when man has been thiking for symbols and universal gestures.

 "AVATARS," a short film, conceived and directed by Yi Zhou, has been presented at 64th Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica of Venezia, the 6th of September 2007. The film is dedicated to a text of Jean Baudrillard.  The French philosopher analyzes, in those are properly fragments, the special relationship between twins: he asks himself in particular about the concept of siamese twins: on that double identical existence or individual soul that connects two physically distinguished beings and for many various aspects different, sometime in contrast and antagonists.  "Avatar" remembers to us also some platonic myths, in particular those dedicate to the primitive shape of men: a shape of beauty and completeness assigned to human beings before their sexual division. In the orient tradition, the word "avatar" (today known in others contexts, for example in "second life"), is, as we know, connected to the double spiritual life of human beings, to protecting angelic figures, to the cult of heaven. therefore the avatar would be a sort of caretaker angel. The film moreover narrates symbolically the hard work of Sisifo. However tit doesn't stop at this symbolic level; it then describe the surrealistic beauty of nature, the dreams world, therefore it tells about life and death, about love between twins and finally about a deferred double narcisism: that ego one that, first divided, is then recomposed into his own image, this last also deferred to the twin figure.

Yi Zhou (supplement)

Yi Zhou is a young chinese artist, than in few years become very known in international contexts. She lived many years in Rome and now she lives between Paris and New york. Last year she has shown her work in "Palazzo della Signoria" in Florence: a personal exhibition inspired to the "Divina Commedia" of Dante. At the beginning of September she presented "Avatar", her last video, at Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica of Venice. The artist will also participate also to the show "Tomorrow, il futuro sensibile" in occasion del next "Festival della Scienza" of Genova. She is preparing a special project for Miami and a great public installation for New York.

In her work the oriental oniric and fable world is accompanied with a use of technology and science that is extremely sophisticated for quality of search and innovation. To these values she associates a nomadic and eclectic culture, that comes from her living in different places of the world: Beijing and Roma, Paris and New York. Her works came out always from a synthesis of cultural and existential experiences, that are also very complex technological and spiritual experiences. Yi Zhou describes in her videos, photoes, designs, watercoloursi, installations, the ephemeral sense of life, the magic of landscape (artificial and virtual), the perturbing patrimony of the visual and symbolic language, of the unconscious reverie; but every concept or experience is expressed with lightness and irony, with astonishment and grace. In her world the language (of technique, of life or of imagination) is never cold and schematic. Colors, signs, shapes are structured always on the harmonic and musical language of nature, strongly sensual and surrealistic. the Ego, the world, the civilization, the atmosphere, always are perceived like a universe of metamorphosis and dejà-vù: a continuous flow of images and signs structured in shape of story and history, through complex figural developments.

Yi Zhou perceives the nature of the world like progenitrix of shapes, images, dimensions: this creation is repeated in microcosms and  macrocosmos, in living beings and in man, in the visible and invisibile contexts.

In the work of Yi Zhou, the ability to use sofisticate multimedial technology is accompanied to a slow and patient iconographic search: she looks for myth and myths. But the artist seems able to forget all she learn. She works changing media, preparing herself and building structures, grids, frames and rules, following a determinated but accidental way, in any new occasion. Because she wants that everything remains simply a game: a technique and language game, where, like in a glare, poetry and beauty are given off.

Last artist attemp is poetry, with its light heartbeat and its fragile existence: a mysterious game between shapes and symbols, between images and thoughts that provokes movement and surprise. Language and technique seem to presente something of indefinibile and mysterious, which ancient people spoke about. Then Art is still and always that infantile game, that witchcraft, that state of grace, able to make us day-dream in order to open deeper  the inner eyes. It is a not only aesthetic exercise. When it is poetry and not only shape or concept, the artistic shape is a way to converse with our time assuming on us the world of the traditions, the history, the personal life, the world of the archetypes and the ancient genealogie or cosmogonie, so that is possible to to add to the aesthetic plan also the ethical one.

Yi Zhou's work testifies a way to mix culture, models, structures, forcing some emotions, some feelings and perceptions to adapt them to the present. A present that seems to sound and to transform in something of ancient and permanent. In a time of the eternal rewind. Our personal or collective equipment of experiences and memories get over the mere contingency and dress with something of previous. The artist in her last works has used Dante, the "Divine Commedia", the "the Greek Metamorphoses" of Ovid, tragedies, the poetry of Baudelaire and Eliot, has watched the ancient world and Reinassance, the Dutch 1600's and the German Romanticism; really known history, figures and landscapes or only imaginated; a universe of signs and images that get in her imaginary and present itself witha new dress. In this way, always, Art and Culture transform themselves only differently using and adapting part of their history, as in every place and every time.