The interpretation abyss often dividing avant-garde artists from their audience is the main subject of Honoré de Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece" . In this novel, the author describes the lack of communication experienced by Frenhofer, a painter working in secret for sixteen years to a naked woman project he considers his masterpiece, which will never be recognized as such. In his attempt to go beyond mere representation, the artist condenses a mass of confused brush strokes, so confused that the subject of the work becomes unrecognizable.

Confronted with the impossibility to understand the genesis of the work, the first spectator to see the masterpiece uses the following words to describe it: "I can only see a confused assembly of colors, bound together by a multitude of bizarre lines that form a wall painting" .

Frenhofer’s artistic research is animated by the need to create life through signs which are not related to representation or allegory. His "search for an absolute meaning destroys all meaning, leaving only signs, meaningless forms" ². His artistic failure does not diminish Frenhofer’s revolutionary spirit, defined by Agamben as the "perfect type of Terrorist". Agamben refers to Jean Paulhan’s distinction between what he calls "Rhetoricians, whose main task is to dissolve all the meaning in the form, which becomes the only law of literature" and the "Terrorists, who refuse to obey this law and pursue the opposite dream of using a sense –centered language, a language representing a thought in whose flame all signs could be burned out, leaving writers confronted with the Absolute".

Today, artists are once again free to represent the Absolute through men, the organic world as well as through informal or geometric shapes, going beyond the annihilation advocated by both "Rhetoricians" and "Terrorists". Frenhofer’s sorrows are thus expressed through a new synthesis of sign and meaning, in which the audience can recognize themselves.

Frenhofer’s collective exhibition offers a small panorama on the use and mixture of abstract and figurative art in recent years. Although different materials are used, the seven short-listed young artists all share the need to represent life, conceived as a whole in its organic, material and transcendent aspects. In their representation of life, the seven artists do not only study its surface, as the skin covering a body, but penetrate its most secluded recesses.

Similarly to Frenhofer, the protagonist of Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece," the throbbing vitality of the body is both the subject and the coveted end of all artistic creation.

In his "Octagon meat" Marcello Tedesco sculpts an octagon out of a marble stone, to represent the flesh embedded in the language. He thus uses existing narrative patterns to create a new story that generates new bodies. In the "Golden Age" series, the artist develops a parallel reality generated by an octagonal array, in which the feminine element is the only one to be taken into account. Starting from her longing for faraway places and family, Patrizia Emma Scialpi reflects on the relationship of the body with the surrounding environment. In her "Love and Loss" series, the artist uses some pictures and full-length portraits of people on the shore. She then covers people’s faces using the brush. People’s identity is thus replaced by a body, living in harmony with the landscape, of which it becomes an integral part.

The relationship between men and the places they live is the main focus of Daniel Carpi’s work. To him, life is connected and affected by the environment with which it interacts. The head, the artist’s favourite subject, is a vase transfigured by its content and by external elements. The mind is contaminated by natural and social patterns leading to bizarre geological aggregations that stand out against a neutral background. Organic and geological elements also appear in Fiorella Fontana’s works, where the artist combines the flow of organic life with the spontaneous flow of thoughts. The microcosm is related to the macrocosm by means of an ongoing dialogue in which each sign refers to a whole.

Reality perceived as a flow is one of the key aspects of Francesca Ferreri’s work. The artist is influenced by the latest discoveries in neuroscience and includes everyday objects in several sculptures. These objects are bound together to create new organic forms, where vacuum becomes a new system of relations. Through solid matter, space becomes a tangible presence, a reference to mental associations revealed during dream.

Vacuum, seen as a tangible space, is also present in Jacopo Casadei’s works. By overlapping signs and vibrant colors, the artist outlines moving and indefinite masses, figurative allusions of the organic world the artist hints at through the use of a vital sign.

The movements of the body, which Casadei depicts with his soft and sinuous brush stroke, become linear geometries in Maria Lucrezia Schiavarelli’s work. In her "Ta tan" project, the artist worked with a dancer and focused on the perception of movement as an abstract form in space. Dance movements were interpreted by the artist through projections of lines and light shapes. These were then used by the dancer as a path for further workout, paving the way for a potentially infinite hall of mirrors.

Text by Andrea Lacarpia

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Related images

  1. Daniele Carpi, Senza Titolo, collage grafite inchiostri tempera su carta, 80 x 100 cm
  2. Patrizia Emma Scialpi, Love and loss, 2014, acrilici su stampa inkjet su carta hahnemühle bamboo, 42 x 29 cm
  3. Fiorella Fontana, Senza Titolo, 2014, sabbia su vetro, velluto e ottone, 200 x 80 cm
  4. Francesca Ferreri, Sensazione 7713, 2013, oggetti gesso pigmenti
  5. Marcello Tedesco, Ottagono di carne, 2012, marmo rosa e pepita di rame, 40 x 15 x 56 cm
  6. Maria Lucrezia Schiavarelli, TaTan, 2013, acquerello su carta, 25,5 x 36 cm