Mind landscapes, artificial circuits, schizoid visions, worlds painted by using sophisticated technologies which interact with organs and membranes, with neurons. It's already the biotechnologies era.
Bianco-Valente's works, by this duo of Neapolitan artists working together, mark a watershed in terms of the medium itself.

Technology invades the artistic field, pushing art more and more into the internal and external reality, the digital evolution, and it moves towards the only one aspect of reality still permitted, that is to say the phenomenological and existential aspect.
As Merleau Ponty wrote, “vision is the confluence of all the aspects of human being, just like a crossroad”. The artist places himself/herself at the centre of this junction and throws technology into the boundless realm of matter, into our psychic dimension.

The Bianco-Valente's printed wax paintings portray figures floating into hallucinated backgrounds, just like into a molecular and neuronal structure, into undefined spaces, confused and crossed as in an altered state of perception. A taste remains on the skin, a memory of something already crossed or known, something already experienced in this life or perhaps in an afterlife.
And everything is disclosed in the complicated combination of images and associations, sensations and apparitions that penetrate our eyes, beating our inside, like sounds that the two artists elaborate digitally, stretching them like membranes and not like waves.

Bianco-Valente's videos, installations and photographs are not simply made up of technological imagery, nor do they use structural complexity as a storytelling device; instead they penetrate the fabric of perception, trying to trace it back to its source, its pre-human origin, the language that binds body to mind.
This is the pre-human universe - lying well beyond the limits reached by countless technological prostheses - which they turn outward, making it visible and perceptible for that brief instant, for that one minute the projection lasts, like a flash that blinds the gaze as it bursts.
And if body links the living being to ground, to life, to a tangible and material space, showing itself in all its precariousness, smallness and heaviness; what we can perceive of the beyond through mind is the evidence of a space a thousand times enormous, complex and limitless.
Bianco-Valente play a subtle, dangerous game: their work develops on the fringe of language and technique, in the obscure dimension of vision and perception, where space and time, finite and infinite, are made all of matter and spirit.

Their works imply an interrogative: how long does matter exist and resist in comparison with mind? Could dematerialization be possible through the absurd combination time-energy? The irony of human existence that combines just these two elements, so distant and incompatible into a single being, maybe is that. What eyes see these landscapes, what senses perceive these dimensions, these colours, these sounds? The eyes of an alien coming from a world "outside," or eyes turned inward into a dimension more boundless than any exterior?

Are these senses that only technology places at our disposal?
Cézanne liked to repeat that colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet. Perhaps the heat of the south provoked hallucinations in him too, the same acute sensibility that overwhelmed Van Gogh and forced him to surrender.
_
October 2000

leggi in italiano »

back to index