TURIN. The bodies are so many that inside the corridors of Artissima it seems to be at a concert, and it is not for the return of the public to the fair, which has been standing still for two years, and it does not happen only there but in any space invaded by the contemporary week in Turin. . Bellies, legs, faces, restless feelings, convinced looks, indefinite sexuality and no desire to be trapped by generalities.
Art doesn’t need to invent a language to be inclusive, it already has it. It is fluid by nature, respectful of a gender identity that no longer needs to be explained and no longer has the duty to be declared. In the US they have just issued the first non-binary passport and the direction of the art is the same. It does not give points of reference, but it imposes its presence. In flesh and blood. The taste for ambiguity is rediscovered and winks less and less.
Artissima restarts in Controtempo with 154 galleries to be “touched”
cristina indalaco
This time the fair is all muscles and faces, maybe they crumble because you look bad, maybe they split like the profiles of Damiem Meade, from Limerick, the Ireland of Angela’s Ashes who already dressed all her children unisex for economic reasons. Now their hypothetical grandchildren no longer have the myth of steady work or even belonging. They are made of photographs and painting mixed together and of broad shoulders stuck on long necks, of people mounted on top of each other. Or one into the other, as happens in the tangle of Melike Kara, a German with Kurdish roots accustomed to having no borders: and she does not give any to the characters who populate her paintings with beautiful features and intolerance to declinations. We mix. One job after another, it seems to have come out of the book by Achille Lauro, a singer devoted to eclecticism: “Confusion is my way of dissenting and reiterating my anarchism, of rejecting the conventions which then generate discrimination and violence “.
The week of art becomes a “free zone”, the slogan that gives its title to Flashback, another fair that tickles the desires of collectors, and that recalls the Safe Houses, the safe houses, the theme of one of the three exhibitions at the Sandretto Foundation. Three titles for a continuous call to neutrality. Eliminated the pleasantries, in “Stretching the Body” we make the whole journey, from the hyperrealism of girls who eat spaghetti in a comic stereotype, left in circulation from old advertisements, to tattooed people, with interchangeable clothes. Lace and military notes, skin that changes as if it were embroidery. Mondo Måneskin in short: “All eyes on me I feel like I’m a superstar / I’m not a freak I just thought it was carnival” carnevale), from Mammamia, the latest success of the group.
Even the virtual bends at bold will. In the dialogue staged by Martine Syms between a black golfer, now a former number one, and her assistant who massages her ego to keep her on the field, with the request to represent an entire category, the boredom towards this way is clear. to understand sport and life. In fact, the exchange is entrusted to an algorithm. Simone Biles, a gymnast with 4 Olympic gold medals, has now detached herself from the system and demonstrates that you can take another path, without necessarily having to win forever, for an idea, for a race, for a genre.
At least in the paintings there is no hiding. Artissima reconstructs the time spent having to justify itself in the photos of Sunil Gupta that document the gay world of the Eighties. It is a starting point that gives the idea of how far we are from there, despite the sinking of the Zan bill. Now there are the arms of a female mannequin resting on the male biceps in the images of Nicola Lo Calzo. Diego Marcon’s cartoons draw figures without entity yet full of personality and a mountain of people covered in mud, almost indistinguishable, move within Ariel Cabrera Montejo’s paintings. Woodstock effect, only without the 1970s. Ilaria Bonacossa, director of the fair, looks down on the mass of bodies: «A great desire to be there, of material, of character».
The schwa is not needed here: the backs leave no clues, the braids even less and every single being carries the claim of absolute freedom and the conviction of being more than a man, a woman, a gay, a cisgender, more than curves of a doll or beard hair. Not lost, just stubbornly fluid.
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