Antonella Micaletti, Bianco-Valente, 2001
They give physical form to an impalpable dimension, make the mental image visible, and end up circumnavigating themselves.
Indeed, if the visual force of the image corresponds each time to the revelation of an unknown and barely describable field, even more so it represents a further stage in a process of transformation that is physical and biological before it is visual and aesthetic.
Above all, it concerns the artists themselves before it concerns the viewer.
The idea that reality is first and foremost a perpetual flux of transformation leads them to bend over their work, with the same obsessiveness as two researchers, searching out every possible passage, fixing and making real whatever stage — however transitory — can be captured and disseminated.
Their home is their brain, the place where the chain of processes unfolds that makes us aware of any operation of thought itself. They produce much of their work at home, at the computer, trying to penetrate the world starting from tiny fragments, demonstrating with every piece that poetry and art are above all a cognitive act. As such, their fate is to record themselves, waiting to come indefinitely into being.
Indeed, alluring images, sounds and colours draw the viewer into unprecedented three-dimensional realities. Yet their poetics proves above all to be an art of limits: the lightness and delicacy of the work betray the incorporeal nature of the images, revealing that their poetry is an emanation of the mind and, as such, has no boundaries. Bianco-Valente express themselves chiefly through video, precisely because the unstable quality of low-resolution electronic images is so well suited to the purely mental nature of those images.
Their installations, too, reflect this non-objective nature. In "Untitled" (1998), for instance, a slowly moving human figure is visible on a tiny LCD screen set into the wall, forcing the viewer into isolation from others and into concentration on their own experience, within a space confined entirely to an individual encounter. The work, however, is installed within an exhibition, so it is experienced by many individuals at once, who cannot communicate about it except by making a further transformation through language.
In the video "Welcome X" (1998), made together with the band 24 Grana, organic images follow one another alongside others that evoke an unidentifiable landscape, in a rhythm that seems to transform each into the other.
More recently, the subject of their images has become increasingly, explicitly organic: the biological detail that makes possible the exchange between reality and cognitive activity, between the invisible and the perceivable. Enlarged, coloured brain cells become the subjects of their work — portraits of living organisms that carry within themselves, at once, both the memory of genetically encoded data and the future physical and emotional operations they will be able to trigger.
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Taken from: House , curated by A. Micaletti, M. Massaioli Editore, Pesaro, 2001