Luciano Parisifounding member
Signs and words in the way of art
Luciano Parisi moves to Rome from his native Puglia in 1980 where he develops his love for the stage in close contact with the experimental avantgarde theatre of Leo De Bernardinis and by attending courses in theatre at the University La Sapienza under the great Eduardo De Filippo.
At the end of the eighties he sets up the artistic association “Art Production” with the intent of putting together artists of diverse origins and languages whose passion was that of thecontemporary avantgarde.
He moves to London in 1990 where for four years he becomes completely absorbed in photography. His attendance of courses at the Paddington College and work at the studio of the photographer Bob Allen provide him with fundamental experience for his future years.
On returning to Italy he shows his work and promotes photographic exhibitions to give exposure to young artists. His creative genius seeks expression in other fields and he sets up in the nineties the design studio ” Image Event Roma” where he produces projects for interior design: illumination sources, tapestries, beds, lamps which emanate light and project images in movement. He recycles examples of modern collectables in his own creations with notable success at home and abroad.
His attendance at the school ” Visual Performing Arts” in London from 1990-1992 was also of fundamental importance in his artistic search for his own language through photography and performing art.
The preponderant use of black and white in this period is highlighted by the addition of poormaterials such as nails, sackcloth, glue, and plaster which underline a deep sense of self in images of a suffering every day nature. The partial concealment of faces or bodies which are,in themselves, ongoing linguistic lacerations reveal existential fragmentations.
Even love which could generate joy or a momentary pause in the suffering of daily life is seen by the artist as violence , an existential paradox in which the human body becoming a field of investigation is exposed to the risks of ambivalence.
Life does not admit hedonism: only art can fill existential emptiness to assume a palingenetic role in the ways of contemporaneity. The house split in two against a yellow background in one of his videos is a memory from the past, a present day dream of a hypothetical recomposition of the self.
Through travelling and especially through meditation on eastern philosophies, Parisi finds food for thought to inspire objects of design that live autonomous lives. The light effusing from his lamps acquires a symbolic value in its interaction with the environment representing a continuous development where technology is never seen as neutral or acritical. “Performing Art” ends with the vision of a written word: a request for love in the muted desert of contemporaneity.
In his latest videos, the refinement of the design coupled with the ‘contaminated’ photographic image communicates inequivocably the drama of our times. It is true we are all wayfarers on life’s road that places deformations before us as persons, divided, lacerated, entrapped and left alone waiting for a probable resurrection. The language of the imagery that develops a new surrealism leaves no space for sublime dreams but makes us reflect on man’s future before its subjection to irreversible change. Headless crucifixes, skeletons of inexistent cities, beds suspended in air, senseless high barriers, quasi diaphragms of an existence in extinction, relics of cosmic exploration- all bring us to nought. In this radical denounciation only the infinite poetry of the forms and an uncontaminated spirit often seen in videos of children of innocent gaze will be able to save us.
Multiple references are to be seen in the works of Francis Bacon and in the algid beautiful surrealism of Rene Magritte. It must be, though, that these fascinations become others, as times change and our sensitivity changes when touched by the tragedies of the present. It seems that the artist wishes to suggest just that : before man finishes entrapped or suspended in falsehood there lies before him another way shown us through the language of art. Through the imagery and the music which so admirably accompanies the video put together with extreme rigour, Parisi brings us to reflect on the present, on our need to feed on beauty and not on ‘horror’, on our insuppressible instinct to want to see further and to understand the universe to which we belong. And so in the last videos we perceive as in a sudden flash improvised visions of light in unconfined and timeless spaces, bringing us hope and comfort for our possible future.
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