Anna Otto, oil on stainless steel, 57 x 40 cm, 2009
Pianissimo was glad to present Valerio Carrubba’s second solo show at the gallery,12th November – 19th December 2009, in which the artist’s thoughts about the negation of the image assume new and unexpected directions.
The exhibition had its fulcrum on Body Double #1, an inedited project constituted by the video projection of an “opera libretto”, a “dramaturgic text” superimposed to that of any movie, projected simultaneously and on the same screen. The two bodies lay down one on top of the other, but remain separated and independent, on respective running times and contents.
Body Double #1 is a truculent monologue, an abominable psychological drama in three moments, drenched in hate and despise against an abstract other’s body, victim of a long and reiterated series of fearsome violence and cruelties that the protagonist – a vague Ego – will address to the self body during the final delirium, inflicting an awful death to himself, in a mood of hallucination and iconoclastic fury.
The narration is slow, monotone, exhausting, volountarily dilated and often repetitive. The havocs on bodies, the overabundant and tragicomic representation of their systematic dismantling, of their minute destruction -piece by piece- are described with precision of detail and colour, as a painting of bodies gutted off by wounds, a late Goya, an image of the twisting of intellect. The text is scientifically precise but hyperbolically repellent, according to a convulse urge of whole anatomic unveiling, of complete disarticulation, of multiplication of wounds, of amputations, of tortures, on a greedy and satisfied aesthetic of bodies humiliation and destruction.
Completes the exhibition a poster for Body Double #1 – inspired by the originals from the Grand Guignol theatre – and two new paintings, still characterized by the double paint layer, but that adopt this time a metaphoric reference opposite to the anatomical ones.
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