REBIRTH
24 Mar 2018 – 21 Apr 2018
Santissimi (otherwise known as Sara Renzetti and Antonello Serra) use the body as an instrument of understanding.
From birth until death its form defines the relationship with space and other beings; its decline is the unit of measurement transforming time into a complex concept.
Their research has the melancholy of intimacy when observed at distance. They create meticulously human size sculptures of cruelly flawed, weakened bodies. They are the healthy carriers of emotional deformities; unperturbed faces with closed eyes.
The subjects are disturbing but submerged in an unreal tranquility. They have learnt about the existential anxiety overcoming the Kafkian vertigo. Ultimately, they have recognized incompleteness as an essential condition of being. Santissimi‘s work is based on a self-consciousness that starts from chaos and ends up in comprehension.
Skin is the container where unstoppable changes occur, becoming the complete symbol of an entire life cycle. What is disorienting is the proportion: unlike the gigantic works of Ron Mueck, the 1:1 scale is what makes them a mirror where the reflected image is nothing but ourselves.
In the Natural History series, the silicone sculptures appear crystalized in resin, like a collection of anatomical fossils where ancestral fears are catalogued with scientific rigor. In Migrants (self-portrait) the sculptures become travelers, real life flying animals caught in the second before leaving their pedestal and, with it, their own identities.
Mom, showed for the first time, is the last evolution of their research, where the form goes back to its origin. Suspended and clutched with a rope that is both a slip-knot and a support, flesh becomes pure matter to form. A mass that surrenders itself to losing every feature. Mom is an embryo without force, laying down the ropes like a modern Pietà; it is the birth of something undefined, anguishing but nostalgic, able to dig into the deepest archetypes and bringing back to light an irrational and uncertain inwardness.
The sense of waiting is strong: every work suggests the promise of a movement that never comes, stretching time into a single cyclic moment. The power of Santissimi‘s images is rewriting the concept of decency, morbidity and bodily sacredness.
In their aesthetic the body is raised as first the boundary between the mind and the world; their representation of it lacking any form of mitigation is what can both wound or console the observer.
WHITE NOISE GALLERY
Via della seggiole, 9
Rome
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