In the late 90s the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman coined the famous metaphor of liquid society to express the uncertainty of the individual immersed in an increasingly frenetic and homologating life that, after the dismantling of the great narratives of the last century, finds its uncertain unit of measure in a risky hedonistic individualism.  This theory has proved to be very prophetic in intuiting the developments of the multimedia and globalized society in which we find ourselves now and in anticipating the consequent transformations of communicative languages, the dissolution of the concept of identity and the anxieties that afflict human existence. These suggestions were promptly received by a vast group of artists who have translated into image the solicitations to which our contemporary imagery is subjected, offering new mental projections and keys to the reading of the reality that surrounds us.

These coordinates are well suited to introduce the work of Giorgio Bartocci, a young street artist from the Marches who lives and works in Milan with frequent trips to Italy and abroad for site-specific environmental interventions. His work, which explores the complex relationship between man and the area in which he lives, is characterized by an impulsive and gestural approach that results in an expressionist painting in which color is a direct manifestation of the physical tension of the artist who is committed in a real body to body with the surface to be worn. The result is a sort of camouflage with bright  and often acid tones that interprets the wall as an exploded space crossed by dynamic currents that pulverize the two-dimensionality projecting it into a multifaceted field of forces that also attract the surrounding environment. In this way, the verticality of the wall ideally links painting to the fluctuating changeability of the clouds of the sky against which it stands out while its interior area filled with the swirling flow of liquid brushstrokes in free overlap seems to expand in all directions suggested by the trend of color flows. These powerful pieces of abstract painting, which often derive from chromatic sampling from nature and animals, express the hyper-interconnection of global society and hypothesize its future developments in the direction of an increasingly substantial dematerialization, elaborating the concept of liquidity theorized by Bauman. The swirling movement of painting seems to find its propulsive center in some recurrent thickening of black color that sketch phantoms of humanoid physiognomies endowed with elementary organic openings in place of eyes, mouth and nostrils. These fluid forms, which refer to an archaic and primitive aesthetic permeated with animist spirituality, are the synapses that regulate the energy of the pictorial field and lead the observer’s gaze into the artist’s secret emotional labyrinths, making it possible to glimpse its most profound reasons.
In the exhibition “Ingranaggi Emotivi”, which brings a series of paintings and sculptures created by Bartocci as an emanation and design idealization of his environmental works, these charismatic presences are extrapolated from the wall and become protagonists of images on a reduced scale that monumentalize their essence. Here the painting, always instinctive and carried out with large brushstrokes of liquid color, decanted in unprecedented transparencies and textures refinements that create a new dreamlike harmony extended towards three-dimensionality thanks to the insertion of further elements applied to collage. The installation vocation of the project is even more evident in the assemblages and sculptures in painted and glazed mortars that sublimate the verticality of the wall in a hypothesis of contemporary obelisk able to connect the irrationality of the human unconscious with its innate aspiration to a spirituality shared while acknowledging at the same time the epochal semantic disintegration of our present.

Info:

Giorgio Bartocci. Ingranaggi Emotivi.
2017, November 17th – December 30th
Portanova 12
via Portanova 12 Bologna