Vincenzo Giugliano

A Path towards the hyper-present

Without being able to discern a previous chronological order, collage techniques have been used in the past century with an increased emphasis-probably inspired by the multiplicity of media and materials available while taking care to not become a genre, and a style or language, even less so. Each artist has his own way with each piece of art that is created; this is assumed. Each work or oeuvre is supposed to have its own idiolect. Other collages have exploited the opportunity to play with the familiarity of media (newspapers, magazines, cardboard smeared with regional and international stamps, etc) Their characters more or less unheard of for expressing the fog of the world.

Vincenzo Giugliano engages in the pure art of composition that is as much painting as it is music. Of course, he chooses strong words and images that roam in a space where popes, rock stars, and celebrities coexist and are subject to formal constraints which requires almost every composer to work in the isolated space where he operates, the reconstruction of a problem of dispersion... the concern of the logician in plastic media, such a trope seems inescapable. How can diversity make unity? Independently of the way it is used as raw material while helping here and there with a few brush strokes? Does this alteration automatically make new meaning?

One of the titles of Giugliano's paintings may offer a key, Elicantropo, Propeller Head, a machine to recycle meaning. Tropes of an expression-oriented language... But Vincenzo's approach here is essentially plastic and seeks to solve the question of creating vertigo with a flat surface. This is not just "some news:" what is missing in the press is depth, and McLuhan would have said it does not come from the journalist or his supervisors, but the medium itself. It would indeed be absurd to make something thick one leaf at a time. In order to tackle a surface, cuts are made, things dismembered, cut up, separated out, but thanks to the magic of the brush, they float in a space that in spite of everything, is still within the painting. Durer recommended to close the letters that we want to draw, to trace squares of angles designated by the letters. But here the letters have already been drawn and traced as arbitrary to the painting and it does not depend only on its own laws, letters or signs, freed from their obligation to mean something, to mean the space where each letter serves as a foil to the other-here they begin to create depth, a sign that the world is becoming one rebellious archive. We must therefore throw ourselves in the painting as in an imaginary city of which we sometimes have glimpses, and sometimes we have a map to see it. This way of approaching the technique is to take advantage of the tabulation of elements that allows a space where letters and signs of the present time are marginalized. Elements that we are used to grasp in isolation in sections while flipping through the newspaper, unfold here...juxtaposed to each other, showing off the artifice and tricks that allow them to hide themselves. On the canvas, the fragments of the language of the press exhibits the situation of cryptograms... it is a challenge to time, that appears because, no doubt, it is a kind of apotheosis for the debris of meaning fished out of the press to have access to a second life, a sort of immortality in the paradise of outdated social representations. Fragments of sentences, flashes of icons flashed of the immediacy, it is necessary to stop all this and at least slow down the flow of information conveyed by the media. Thanks to the rule of graphic artistry and composition, letters with disturbing fonts, truncated words, celebrities who are fetishized, icons, symbols-empower and make themselves autonomous and play in the space of the painting with which all of this digs deeply into the different perspectives. The intertwining of text and of painting concerns time. By a curious paradox that is often attributed to the aging Galaxy Gutenberg, the temporal connotation of the text is immediacy, instantaneousness. The reference to this language feels like a kind of farewell to the press... It leaves us as the generator, the creator, of how we see the world...

Jacques Bollot - 22/03/2011