michelangelo penso/grande batterio quasi mostro

michelangelo penso
grande batterio quasi mostro
oil-resistant rubber, aluminium, steel, 12,5×3,5×4 m, 2011
courtesy galerie alberta pane, parigi

a passage from the Pierluigi Basso Fossali’s text, appeared on semioticaviva:
[…]The gaze literally pierces a sacrificial body, a hanged and not identified corpse (“???” by Michelangelo Penso), brushing with what is the minimum amount of dignity attributable to another person’s identity. Of this body hanging from the ceiling the limbs and the animal nature can be made out: perverted butcher’s shop where the meat is un-consumable . The voids of presence are circumscribed by instruments of coercion, imprisonments and regimentations of the body’s will: some sort of saddles, reins, harnesses, where aluminium and steel replace leather. Hanging in the air, reversed, this body subjugated but taking refuge in the invisible, leaves the desire to be the centre of attention to various instruments to ride the invisible. The claim of the device of coercion is so strong to resonate in the imagination of the spectator, in a non-literal manner, that feels unsaddled. These, in fact, continue to pierce the figure, to detect violence, but would like to reduce the ghost of pain to the pure concretion of a statuesque ballet in a theatre of abstract shapes. The maximum amount of sacrifice of the figure is indeed to asperse it in single formats devoid of an organic entirety that can reclaim them. Seemingly purifying the vision, the aesthetic gaze risks to exacerbate the violence, the humiliation of the figure that keeps being glimpsed, despite the possibility of changing one, a thousand perspectives. […]


artwork part of
Contractions 
curated by daniele capra 
sass muss, schiara building
17 september – 16 october 2011