Bruno Di Marino - Neurovisions: Bianco-Valente's videos, 2000
The electronic image constitutes in Bianco-Valente videos a kind of cerebral extension, the possibility of a bodily smaterialization.
Suggestive and fascinating, sometimes relaxing, more often alienating, psychedelic and obsessive (like the strutturalist sequence of children faces accompanied by a nursery rhyme in Mind Landscape), their mnemonic images flow magmatic, reboil like an unstoppable lava that overwhelms the last bodily and figurative residue (again Mind Landscape). Intermittences of the heart, of the mind and of the vision, their images speak to our present, past and future senses.
The essentiality of their "electrovisions", often monochrome (the spreading blue in the recent videos “Deep in My Mind” and “Soft Luggage”, the red of “Untitled”), bring us to level zero of sensoriality.
The way in which Bianco-Valente use technology is never baroque or redundant, but always carefully controlled.
The content is in restraining, without unuseful dispersions of visual and sense energy. This philosophy of the essentiality is opposed to the spreading aesthetics of the so-called postorganic, still too close to the concept of body as machine, to the performance as a carnival and "neo-primitive" ritual.
By seeing their works, we get the impression to discover for the first time the kinetic-abstract images, 80 years later the experiments of the vanguard cinema. But theirs is never an ingenuous technological classicism, never really “poor”. Even if Bianco-Valente deal with the low resolution of the basic visual process, they create images formally perfect.
They extrapolate from the electronic image its evanescence, its dinamism, its virtual, metamorphic and above all its neurotic nature. Video is just a mental process.
Getting free from the concept of body as substance, means to regenerate it. It means using technological medium not to sling our "meat machine" even more, but reducing body to pure thinking or seeing, through images that have the same nature of dreams. In the end, thought is the only possible reality (aesthetically too).