Sergio Risaliti, Mind Landscapes, 2000
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, two neapolitan artists working together, symbolize as regards their production, a sort of watershed.
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 illimitate ground 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 digital paintings are not only made of technological images. They don't use the structural complexity as an instrument of enchantment, but penetrate into the weft of the perception trying to find the end, the pre-human origin, the language that links body to mind.
This is the pre-human universe - which is set beyond the limits achieved through technological artificial prosthesis - that the two artists turn ouside, making it visible and perceivable just for a brief instant, the running minute of the projection, just like a flash that blinds us while bursting.
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 alien's eyes coming from a distant world or eyes turned inside out a dimension more unlimited than any outside?
Are they senses that only technology put at our disposal?
Cezanne liked repeating that colour is a place where our brain and the universe meet each other. Maybe the south hot weather provoked also to him hallucinations, and also that subtle sensibility that shocked Van Gogh obliging him to surrender.
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October 2000