Happy Days – It’s all well and dandy in a disquieting new world
Stefano Pasquini
Not much has been happening nowadays in contemporary art. At least on this side of the globe. Yet I’m starting to feel a certain disquieting atmosphere in many works of art I experienced in the past few months. Especially from women. Could it be a reaction to a certain belligerent attitude of a certain democratic country in order to solve a certain economic crisis? It could be.
Under the happy disguise of fashionable or light artworks, these artists are digging deep into our hidden fears. Their finished product is certainly prepositional and positive: all of them are busy in their artistic research, and they seem to keep on doing so regardless of what’s been going on. Yet their work is starting to show some questioning, some deeper search for something missing.
Annalisa Cattani was recently asked to help fashion designer Rohka in the presentation of her winter 2004 collection. Repeating a performance where she was inside a weather balloon, she asked the models to sit inside these latex spaceships for the duration of the Milan catwalk. The result was a highly surreal atmosphere, very much unlike anything related to fashion I ever saw. The most breathtaking part of the performance was when the lights went off and all you could see were these silhouettes inside the balloons, lit only by an emergency torch. Somehow I felt catapulted in a not too far apocalypse-now future, and the balloons were now defense shields, immune to any weapon of mass destruction.
Zelda Panda is a young DJ who recently moved to Berlin and always entertained her public with funny visual drawings made directly with the computer. Her most recent series has too taken an unexpected sicker twist: "Leo", for example, is still surrounded by happy fashionable colors, yet his hands are about to grab someone’s neck, revealing that there’s definitely something that pisses him off. What this may be, it’s left to the viewer to imagine.
Adriana Torregrossa is an artist in love with Arabic culture, who spent time in Morocco, Iraq and Egypt. Some years ago she caused a storm in Italy when she broadcast in a main square in Turin the last Ramadan prayer: immediately newspapers where accusing the mayor to be turning the town into a Muslim mosque: in reality all she did was repeating what happens daily in countries not that far from Italy. Her "Self Portrait" is another of her simple conceptual operations: she put on a chador and took a life size photograph of herself. Her face is serene, she seems comfortable in it, and this is the strength of the work: all our preconceptions vanish looking at her face.
Jennifer Schmidt is a young artists and curator working in the Boston area. In her installation "Suddenly", she explicitly informs us that eventually something’s got to give. She neatly placed popcorn kernels on the floor of the gallery space, repeating the patterns of a vinyl kitchen floor. Suddenly they break into popcorns, becoming a big series of clouds about to take over the world. Even in the kitchen of a middle class house (we hear the sound of a microwave oven) something can go wrong, or suddenly right, and she’s there for us to witness it.
Sandra Sisofo is permanently busy drawing little men and women, almost as a purification process. Her tormented graphic figures can be seen at first as happy children illustrations. At a closer look you notice they’re often women wearing burkas with holes showing their genitals, or men missing limbs, or saints with a schizophrenic grin on their face. Her newest project consists in actually making one of these figures in a huge scale puppet: the ultimate human condition, huge in size yet unable to make a change.
Antonia Lucchese is almost a traditional watercolor painter, yet her recent works have spaced into a more abstract instability: what used to be a landscape is now a fragmented fluid mental image. Where is this going? I wonder. And where is she going? I’m curious and I want to see more. Knowing she makes hundreds of watercolors monthly, the process can become frightenly fast. Once again, something’s bound to happen.
Alice Volta makes little drawings of little women with a little goal: war to culture as it is. In her almost minimal flash animations, she shows these women doing little mechanical ballets, crying and interacting with each other. Her television culture is impeccable, as impeccable are the advertising spots she inserts in the animations: a cry for help in getting represented, a uaulab (wow lab) festival she’s organizing, a political statement against this culture of war. Again, her research has broadened to define and state that something has gone wrong, and even though we all like watching cool videos on MTV and the pastel 3d graphics that are so fashionable right now, there are people in Argentina (and among these, artists friends of hers) who are trying to make a difference in their daily life, with small actions, little by little.
This fairy tale continues with the acrylics on digital prints by Karin Andersen. This Bologna based German painter has found her language when she decided to use both Photoshop and paintings on the same canvas. Not an easy choice in the snobbish Italian art world, but certainly a significant one. She now takes us into her Star Trek-like world where the heroine (usually herself) is half alien, half insect, often a product of some weird genetical experiment: "the sci-fi alien to me is a symbol of the anxiety," Andersen stated in an interview, "the discomfort felt in front of the anthropomorphic universe".
Digging a little into these beautiful looking artworks, where everything looks fine and normal, the anxiety in the background reveals itself. All we are left to is wait and see where it will take us.
