It's been a while since I am reflecting on the evolution of my works, on the celebratory aspect, sometimes "sacred", of the images and on their symbolic value. Especially in the era of Instagram, able to "sanctify" the images and the subjects contained in them.
The idea that started to take hold in my head is therefore to make my works evolve into real altars of the contemporary imagination. It all started with the re-discovery of those votive altars, the so-called "aediculae" that disseminate the walls and intersections of the streets and alleys of southern Italy. I lived in Rome for 15 years but I returned to live in Calabria for about two years and a half.
This allowed me to observe it with a different look, more critical, detached, curious and attentive. Already existing in Greek and Roman eras, the sacred images or icons kept in the "aediculae" or votive shrines, temples, as well as reproducing the appearance of a person, communicated through the composition, the expressions, the clothing and the colors a very important message.
The votive aediculae, signed of our history and our culture, formed a real religious network, a sort of "signage" able to communicate feelings, desires and hopes. They expressed the need for divine protection, the need to call on a superior deity to protect the house and those who lived in there, the streets, the crossroads and the people who passed through it.
Predecessors of mass communication on a large scale, the aedicules were also widespread in the most remote places, often by private individuals ventures, as evidence of a received grace, as sign of gratitude, or to symbolize a faultless faith and a blind devotion.
The iconic-visual language was therefore the ideal tool to approach and "retain" a public of devotees, for the vast majority illiterate, in order to spread a clear and unequivocal message that, thanks to the power of the symbols and without having to resort to the use of words, exploited the disruptive power of images coming directly to their hearts and their minds.
By using emotional intelligence (rather than cognitive) for their decoding, images are a en extremely powerful communication instrument capable of acting at an intimately empathic level, eluding any conscious resistance and penetrating deeply in an immediate way.
In our era, the power of images has reached unprecedented levels. Our hyper-fast consumption lives are essentially characterized by a massive presence of visual narratives, very often impromptu and superficial.
I refer specifically to Instagram, the social visual storyteller par excellence that gives us free access to the private lives of our idols as well as strangers.
By breaking down the distances and celebrating the familiarity and presumed authenticity of the images, Instagram leads the viewer to recognize the value of the images by reaffirming their power to configure reality, creating new and synthetic everyday life perceived as authentic.
Thanks to social networks these individuals are transformed into icons, models of reference on which to be molded, symbols capable of conveying apparent feelings, desires and hopes.
Social media’s capacity to alter the perception of the real life, together with the affirmation of a reality in which the image is increasingly disconnected from the body, has created a world in which the synthetic, artificial image become the truth, the only possible realness.
By disconnecting from reality, the image acquires the status of reality, as an independent version detached from its original version. Deprived from its direct dependence on the reality from which it originated, the image therefore becomes a simulacrum.
So, when he original/copy opposition dissolves, being/appearing, true/false, true reality gives way to the cult of images and idols, becoming itself an object of veneration without referring to another by itself, to an original real.
Through my works I therefore want to investigate and to enhance the result of this viral mechanism capable of transforming some individuals into real “sacred” symbols by creating the “votive aediculae" of our days, expressions of the illusion of capturing genuine moments in perfectly contrived reality.
It is my personal reworking of images in "sacred" terms, the exaltation of their symbolic value, the birth of my votive aediculae.
