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In the past, the Imprimatur was by definition a public signal given by the political and social system that it accepted a product of the mind. Imprimatur, not only authorisation from religious authorities, but also approval of a cultural artefact on the part of the civil authorities or the censors.

Here, the title of the exhibition Imprimatur denotes recognition from one of the key figures in the art system, the critic, of a panorama of fresh young international artists who have as yet barely touched the various public and private exhibition spaces.

In the complex context of contemporary art, the exhibition is a mass-medium that publicises the acceptance of the works by society and by the inner core of the art system.

The critic’s Imprimatur transforms this acceptance, the mass-medium, into an inevitable and spectacular piece of collective found art.

The critic’s signature becomes the autograph guaranteeing the frame, the public event of exhibiting the art.

The art of Imprimatur tends to recognise itself as belonging to a context that is a kind of technically pre-existing world state, as described by Ernst Junger.

Here there is no centre, but rather, a field that is constantly pushed from the outskirts.

A constellatory world, according to Norbert Elias’ definition, well represented in art by the dual polarity of the hot and cold transavantguard. Creativity is now expressed without the hegemony of a strong language or the prevalence of a single market.

Geographically, art will tend towards an ambiguous strategy of movement and standardisation, in line with the physical law of continental drift, whereby the distance between landmasses is reduced to the point of near-catastrophe, due to the collision of areas as yet separated by the waters of the oceans: art against the year 2000.

This movement will probably lead to the growth of a common process of visual literacy of mutually distant peoples, brought together telematically by satellites.

At the same time, as far as art is concerned, this spread of visual literacy will create a short-circuit between local and international codes. Contamination is the prevalent characteristic of art that goes against  the year 2000, fomented by the speed of circulation of the various visual codes between the continents of Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. A range of contextual styles up and running in a single context, where artists acting and interacting include Rosin, Delle Chiaie, Anzalone, Bottinelli Montandon, Fermariello, Di Giulio, Anselmetti, Kennedy, Grunert, Colazzo, Corte, Milanova, Galante, Thorel, Cassarà, Sacconi, Samorè, D’Angelo, Gazzola, Filippetta, Battisti, Raggio, Rosso, Berardinelli, Bortone, Delli Santi, Chiodi, Shimizu, Nido, D’Ercole, Mali Wu, Li Ming Sheng, Madhu Kant, Bialecka, Mazzoni, Ceni, Buzzi, Toderi, Galbiati and Kitchou.

In this sense, art maintains its status as a producer of forms of expression that can document the condition of man at the end of the twentieth century.

This is necessarily marked by a kind of neo-austerity, the only possible way in this elementary conflict between north and south, east and west.

It also incidentally sounds an alarm on the standardisation that ensues from the circulation of objets d’art.

Of course, it was always destined to be problematic and ambiguous.

The acceleration exerted by the system indicates its consumption, and implicitly the danger of its ending, but also an adaptability that constantly postpones its death.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, art’s difficulties stand in a planet-wide scenario with implications that could leave their mark on the collective imagination: the perversely humanising birth of biodegradable publicity in America; the television produced in Japan, which pretends to be consumer-centred, with its preference for fashion, architecture and design; the possibility of using a model of full-scale art for social protest, as in the case, broadcast via satellite, of the French farmers who invaded the Champs Elysées with wheat, transforming the monumental Parisian space into a natural, rural one.

“Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science. If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, we are engaged in science.

If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively as meaningful, then we are engaged in art.

Common to both is the loving devotion to that which transcends personal concerns and volition “(Einstein).

In an electronically replicated universe, technology, the spectacular extension of science, tames all that is real, natural and artificial, transforming it into its objective equivalent.

Art, in its pluralism of communicative codes, stands as a problematic and creative necessity, with its ability to act as a filter in a world now permanently inhabited by shadows.

 

 

Paolo Cassarà’s world is populated by the same characters that  we see on our own streets, at school, at the bus stop, in the office, at the bar, in pubs and clubs, or at the stadium.

Polychrome terracotta figures, meticulously painted like modern-day Capodimonte figurines, the theatre of life, the clichés of youth culture. Almost any of today’s music is suitable for Cassarà, from heavy metal to disco to Brit pop, but above all, ragga and hip hop.

Five CDs to put in your laptop: Temples of the Boom by Cypress Hill, One Hot Minute by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, anything by Public Enemy, the latest from The Genius GZA, and Sale by Mao e la Rivoluzione.

Recommended reading, perhaps the new Italian novel from Caliceti, Scarpa or Brizzi, or something by Banana Yoshimoto.

The ideal film, Kassowitz’s La Haine.

To drink, cuba libre, with plenty of Bacardi.

 

 

 Polychrome terracotta is Paolo Cassarà’s favourite medium too.

But while Schmidlin prefers to focus entirely on the face, Cassarà widens out to whole, thin and wiry bodies, like rows of vines reminiscent of Giacometti figures.

A suitable historic father to serve as a new starting point, a zero-degree of the contemporary body.

Cassarà describes a broad cross-section of the normality of city life.

From a rapper to an elegant young girl, from a basketball player to an adrenaline-stirring female body, his common characters are here, frozen as if in photographs, with flat backgrounds (clearly visible in these photos that are sculptures) that efface all context.

Our job is to construct stories around the bodies that we recognise in dozens of names and passers-by, in clothing touched or brushed past, in faces like so many others.

The everyday lives in these sculptures, where the world comes face to face with our cultural perspective.

 

 

A

Androgyny

Paolo Cassarà’s sculptures, whatever their size – large, small, life-size or even larger, are often androgynous, which is only natural when the chosen reference is a street lifestyle.

They resemble the youth of the new generation, the offspring of the hippies and of their children, who walk the streets of all the world’s major cities : New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong… They light their cigarette from the kid next to them, then pass it round, they drink from the same beer glass, they touch and kiss each other. Through some strange effect, they all seem to blend into one another, boys with long hair, girls with short hair, until it becomes difficult to tell them apart.

Driving past them, you often can’t tell which sex they are.

The potential offered by this liberation from labels has been harnessed by pop artists ever since the late Sixties.

David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Joan Jett and many others have flaunted an unbounded sexuality, both in their appearance and in their words. Recently this trend has been establishing itself within the “grunge” culture, as Kurt Cobain proved when, during a television programme, he gave Nirvana’s guitarist a lengthy kiss on the lips in protest against the discrimination of gays.

It reminded me that about 15 years ago, on that same programme, Jagger had done the same thing with Peter Tosh, but with a bit more tongue.

B

Boredom

The expressions on the faces of the subjects of Cassarà’s sculptures tend to be similar to those one reads on thousands of faces on the street, broken out, blank, bored to death.

Nothing impresses us any more, and this is precisely what Cassarà intends to record, the disintegration of the lens, with the focus now shifting to the subject – the famous fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol talked about.

Unlike his American contemporaries – Jeff Koons, Paul Mc Carthy, Daniel Oates, the installation artist Xavier Velhan, and the British sculptor Gavin Turk, whose works formally resemble his own, Cassarà portrays himself.

He does not choose images of sexual gratification, of sensory impact, of cultural industrialisation, of violence, of mythological plots. People are portrayed simply as he sees them, somewhat objectively, and not as he thinks we expect to see them, like the ugly mugs and sexy kittens of 1950s American films and Italian porno-soft films.

Cassarà is not afraid to convey to us the boredom of the street exactly as it is, because he knows that it is also our boredom.

C

Larry Clark

After the untimely death of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose sceptre he inherited, Larry Clark deserves to be considered the most important photographer of this generation.

Clark emulates not only the content of Mapplethorpe’s work, but also the tone. What strikes me most about him is his ability to photograph scenes of sexual subject matter without appearing overly voyeuristic.

Indeed, it seems to me that he purposely avoids making erotic images, introducing a sense of imminent danger into the frame, which is never predominant, but is sufficient to balance and soften the emotional impact. Another important thing is that his photographs are not horrific either.

If Mapplethorpe’s works seem to be constructed in a theatrical manner, Clark, on the other hand, should be credited with posing as a character in the narrative he observes and portrays, even though in reality the opposite was probably the case.

I see Cassarà’s works as related to Clark’s by virtue of the common ability to bring out a real humanity against the backdrop of an environment that it is all too easy to trivialise and condemn.

Clark and Cassarà do not portray their subjects as anonymous clichés, which would have been very easy.

The young man photographed by Clark while he has an erection and a needle stuck in his arm is not just any punk, in the same way that the young punk sculpted by Cassarà is not necessarily the boy with the erection and the needle in his arm.

D

‘Drugstore Cowboy’

The greatest line about drug addicts in the history of cinema is uttered in a Gus Van Zandt film. Not even those in ‘Easy Rider’ can hold a candle to it.

The ultra-sexy Kelly Lynch pulls off her velvet top, sliding it down her bottom, and then moans seductively as she moves over Matt Dillon, who with his legs spread gives no sign of reacting: ‘You would never fuck me if I didn’t take the initiative.

I think that’s just how it goes, or almost.

The film reminds me of something a friend of mine invariably says, whenever he breaks up with one of his junkie friends.

He says that men become junkies so that they can have an excuse not to fuck and not to take a bath.

The paradoxical thing is that precisely this reluctance, according to him, makes them attractive and sexy anyway, with sweat and foul smell being the icing on the cake and enhancing their image of unwanted masculinity.

There is nothing that turns some people on like the knowledge that they cannot have the object of their desire.

This has never happened to me, because it seems infinitely more fun to me to get what one wants.

E

Elvis in Las Vegas

Elvis had by then fired most of his shells by the time he was performing in Las Vegas, but somehow his white polyester suit.

With the silver and gold studs on his huge shirt collar, made him look like some kind of rock-and-roll Liberace, and his appearance still had a certain impact.

What Elvis had become in the last phase of his career, in those lifeless shows, was so at odds with the origins of his character and the roots of the black music he had pillaged and plundered, that he almost seemed to want to redeem in punk rock terms his own pitiful condition and the contradictions of his own decadence.

It was on contradictory images of this kind that Cassarà and his generation grew up, spectators of the decadence of those rock myths that had been presented to them as children, even if they looked like a Dean Martin.

Years later, the same would happen, with the decline of the 1970s counterculture.

This idolatry whose idols were continually demythologised on the front pages of tabloid newspapers eventually produced the particular irony that characterised artists like Cassarà and others of his generation.

F

Fashion

The use of fashion as a characteristic element is something that Cassarà is familiar with, and he does it well.

In this respect he is not unlike the mass media, who also plunder contemporary culture in all its aspects, and exert so much influence on Cassarà himself.

The expressions on the sculptures’ faces tend to offer us a blank slate, inexpressive and distant like the faces of the handsome boys and girls we see in bars; the clothes they wear, on the contrary, tell us far more. Leafing through any men’s or women’s magazine can be a bewildering experience.

Youngsters fresh out of puberty are decked out the way their parents only dreamed of as they watched the films of Fellini.

Once again, the most striking thing is the expressionless faces, even when they are depicted as dead and bleeding.

On the streets, fashion reveals every detail, be it in the ghetto or on Madison Avenue, and the most surprising thing is that while the younger generation declare their will to defend their individuality, they actually seem anxious to drown their own style and taste in a sea of conformity.

I look at them, and I wonder: who sold to whom first, and who influenced whom? Was it fashion that sold them the idea that they should dress in a certain way? Or did the initiative come from the street, and then fashion followed? Whatever happened, conformity generates uniforms, and Cassarà’s figures reveal everything about themselves and their identity through the clothes they wear.

G

Gangsta Rapp

As any street Snoop Doggy Dogg will tell you, the key to the success of Gangsta Rapp and street performances is authenticity, and if climbing the sales charts and surviving on the streets requires taking out a couple of people, who gives a fuck? What we white people find interesting in Gangsta Rapp – boys more than girls, probably – is not so much a vicarious feeling of pleasure at seeing our murderous instincts satisfied (although this component is undeniable), but an innate sense of envy. The ability to speak out, to even brag about forbidden actions is something white boys would never be able to do. These rappers talk about hooking up with a lot of girlfriends behind their backs, who they occasionally beat up, going around robbing department stores, sleeping with hookers, shooting (even each other), and, what’s nicer, killing their landlords.

A white man has trouble even admitting that he has not paid his last rent.

In Cassarà’s sculptures you can feel the tension between the people who live on the street and the people who walk the street only to return to the safety of their homes. Like me.

Every time I go out to buy bread I think of Jeffrey Dahmer, and yet I love Naughty by Nature, even though I avoid listening to it at night because it terrifies the hell out of me.

 H

Hare Krishna

The most beautiful sculpture to date by Paolo Cassarà is the life-size statue of a Hare Krishna.

What makes this work so important, a kind of map of Cassarà’s intentions and overall oeuvre, is that although the chosen subject easily lends itself to parody and ridicule, the author has managed to give it an obvious aura of dignity. Cassarà, who is not the type to tell fairy tales, does nothing in reality to ennoble this figure, but it is precisely this – I would say – that makes the work so successful, and that ultimately arouses in us a participation that derives neither from a sense of affinity nor of detachment, but as from a fusion of the two.

A minor artist, and certainly a ‘politically correct’ American artist, might not have resisted the temptation to portray Hare Krishna as a saintly, dignified and all-knowing.

Cassarà does nothing of the sort.

On the contrary, he chooses a character well known and despised by the man in the street, and portrays him realistically.

Looking at the Hare Krishna we are struck by its realism, in the sense that Cassarà has made him human, he has made him neither a saint nor a zealot, and it is precisely this that gives the sculpture a particular vigour.

I

Italy: square art

We all hate those statues you see in the beautiful squares of Italy and other European and American cities.

Looking at Cassarà’s works reminds me of the ugliness of those monuments erected to the memory of ‘great men’.

It would be nice, albeit utopian, to see cities commissioning sculptures from Cassarà to beautify their most important squares.

His monuments would certainly be dedicated to the people who use the streets, not to men who have destroyed other empires in order to gain just enough fame to have a memorial dedicated to them made of bad sculpture and banal epigraphs that omit what matters most, namely the truth.

J

Jean Luc Godard

Think of Godard’s constant, silent camera movements, from left to right, from right to left, from left to right, which affirm and reaffirm the presence of the author without interfering with what is happening in front of the camera.

The actors do what they do and the camera does what it does, and occasionally the two meet.

Godard said: ‘Other people make documentaries, I film stories’.

But he was talking about his documentaries.

K

Karaoke

Pick up the microphone, sing along to the music of your favourite song, and you can be a star for even fewer minutes than Warhol predicted.

The karaoke scene that has stuck with me the most is of a group of Hong Kong businessmen who had gathered in November for a birthday party. One of them, after loosening his tie and unbuttoning his shirt collar, started singing ‘I love a woman’ with more sensitivity than Helen Reddy ever could.

The sculptures by Cassarà invite the viewer to become one with them, to experience their best moments as well as their worst.

They invite identification, and that is what made me like them the first time I saw them in a warehouse full of other artists’ works.

They spoke to me and I felt like responding.

L Sophia Loren

If you wonder why, forget it. You will never be a true Italian.

M

The male – and his favourite sports

If so-called ‘contact’ sports did not exist, men would lack a socially acceptable way of expressing their emotions, especially those concerning relationships with others.

Anger and attraction I include them equally in this equation.

For this reason, and because everything then remains largely unsaid, men love sport with an intensity that even film fans do not reach, and there is a certain furious fervour in the way adults assert their right to engage in those sports that make them seem more like children – which, I think, is also a little tender.

Cassarà’s footballers are great, important testimonies to the greatest passion of the human animal; he understands well the role that football heroes play within contemporary culture, so well that he is able to make the football player as human as possible, almost as if to encourage any mythologising of this figure.

N

Nirvana

‘Here is spring again, tender blooming age; he knows what it means, sell the young for food, we can have more.

The water is so yellow.

I am a healthy student, and you are my vitamin.

Take your chance, hurry up, it’s your choice, don’t be late.

And after all maybe I’m the one to blame for what’s being talked about, but I’m not sure, I’m so excited I can’t wait to see you, but who cares.

Who cares if it’s old, I don’t care if I’m brainless, get out of your house.

You must have poisoned skin, give a palm, catch a smile.

I’ve never met a wise man, if anything, a woman; I must find a way, maybe I’d better wait.

I still have one last special message to send; as for defences, I am neutralised and castrated, what the hell am I trying to say? I have come so high that I have scratched myself to a bloody pulp.

The second coming came last and from inside the wardrobe.

At the end of the rainbow and your rope. Don’t hurt yourself, I want some help I have this  man, you know it makes me feel alive, and I have no remorse.

And all the animals I’ve trapped have become my puppies.

Our little group has always been and always will be until the end, when the lights go out it’s less dangerous, here we are, entertain us, a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido yes, yes, a reject, at my best I’m at my worst, and for this gift I feel privileged; I found it hard, it was hard to find, oh well, whatever, don’t worry about it

O

The Oscar

Paolo Cassarà’s small sculptures look a lot like the Oscar statuettes, designed in 1927 by Hollywood set designer Cedric Gibbons. Everyone wants one, and everyone, every now and then, pretends to hold one in their hand in front of the mirror, when they are alone and give emotional investiture speeches: “I want to thank my mother…” Holding one in their hand, anyone can feel like Sally Field when she won her second Oscar in 1985: “You like me. You really like me!”.

Of course, you can also choose the Marlon Brando approach, stay home and send a fake Indian in your place to refuse the award.

Hurrah for Hollywood!

P

Pop Art

Many believe that the reason why American pop art was so immediately and hugely successful in Europe is that it confirmed people’s worst preconceived ideas of the vacuous, consumeristic nature of American society.

It is not hard to understand this attitude, but at the same time the doubt remains that this is too partial a judgement, probably fair where Warhol is concerned, but not for the other artists in the group.

My favourite pop artist has always been Roy Lichtenstein, whose excellence as an art critic is equalled only by the intelligence with which he chooses and portrays his subjects. Whilst the trajectory of Rauschenberg, Ramos, Dine, Krushenik, Warhol and other important pop artists was bright and brief, albeit intense, without anything new to say after the first few works, Lichtenstein is still producing splendid pictures.

From the first simple cartoon pictures, through the mirrors and the decompositions with their large brushstrokes, right up to his most recent production of “interiors”, Lichtenstein continues to reveal his brilliance.

I am not going to go so far as to say that Cassarà is the Italian Lichtenstein, but the style of his works certainly brings him closer to Lichtenstein than to any other pop artist, because they are devoid of the extreme cynicism that so fascinated Jeff Koons and the young artists of the Neo-Geo group.

Pop art is the movement that has had the most influence on Cassarà, and in this context his work ties in above all with that of Lichtenstein, although in other ways he may also bring to mind the sculptures of Alan Jones, or some of Richard Hamilton’s more successful works. 

Q

Quentin Tarantino

(Inside of a ’74 Chevrolet, in motion – morning)One of those dirty, white, gas-powered ’74 Chevrolet Novas is speeding down a Hollywood street frequented by homeless people.

In the front are two young men, a white man and a black man, both dressed in cheap black suits and skinny black ties, with green loden coats over them.

Their names are VINCENT VEGA (the white man) and JULES WINNFIELD (the black man).

Jules is driving.

Jules: …so, listen, you want to tell me about the hash bars? Vincent: What do you want to know? Jules: Well, hash is legal there, right? Vincent: Yeah, it’s legal, but not one hundred percent.

That means you can’t walk into a restaurant, roll a joint, and then start smoking it.

You can only smoke it in your house and in certain places.

Jules: I mean, hash bars. Vincent: Yeah, and the rules are this: it’s legal to buy it, it’s legal to have it, and if you own a hash bar, it’s legal to sell it. It’s legal to carry it, which doesn’t mean anything, because, get this, if the cops stop you they can’t search you.

The cops in Amsterdam don’t have the right to search you.

Jules: That’s it, buddy.

Fuck ‘em, I’m going.

Vincent: I’ll be thrilled.

But you know what the funniest thing in Europe is? Jules: What? Vincent: It’s the little differences: the same shit that’s here is there, but with a little something different.

Jules: Like what? Vincent: Well, in Amsterdam you can buy beer in the movie theaters, and they don’t even give it to you in a paper cup.

They give you a mug of beer, like in a bar. In Paris, you can buy a beer at McDonald’s. And you know what they call a Quarter Pound with cheese in Paris? Jules: Go ahead. What do they call it? Vincent: Royale with cheese.

Jules (echoes): Cheese Royale.

And what do they call the Big Mac? Vincent: Big Mac is still a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac. Jules: What do they call the Whopper?

Vincent: I don’t know. I haven’t been to a Burger King.

But do you know what they put on their fries instead of ketchup? Jules: What? Vincent: Mayonnaise.

Jules: Wow.

Vincent: I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

And they don’t just put a little on the plate.

Damn, they drown it in it. Jules: Uuuhh.

R

Respect

You will never feel that Cassarà views his sculptures patronizingly, and it is this that distinguishes them from similar works produced by other artists.

Cassarà has respect for his people, and for the streets where they live.

This attitude reveals his intelligently astute political vision, exposed with a detachment that is far from rhetorical, and which underlies the success of his works.

Cassarà, for example, avoids making sculptures representing “street folk”, because he knows that he would then somehow have to portray their condition and their emotional state, which would likely be impossible without a fair dose of trivialization, given the milieu.

This is what happens when so many rich pop stars make videos about what it feels like to be homeless.

Cassarà avoids making blatant political statements, and focuses his attention on the street through inclusions and exclusions. If something is missing from Cassarà’s world, that means it is beyond the possibility of being understood by most people, and therefore the image must be left out, because no presence can be less than significant.

S ’70 Culture (The Culture of the 70s)

Remember Pam Grier? The colorful afro wigs? The big mirrored chandeliers in the discos? “Love To Love You Baby”? “The Joys of Sex”? Sylvester the Cat? The bell-bottoms? The rings with the stones that change color? The shag carpet? “Plato’s Retreat”? The peace sign pins? The tacky clothes? “Studio 54”? The Ethel Merman disco album? The platform shoes?

T 

I TV “Talk Shows”

“Oprah, I just don’t know what to do.”

“Yes, honey.

I know it’s hard to talk about, but try to be strong: please try not to cry.”

“Okay, I’ll try. She’s done it again: every time she promises not to do it again, I end up knowing right away that she’s done it again.”

“How?” “What?” “How do you know?” “Little things.

Like I find pubic hair that’s not my color all over my things, you know… on my bra, in my panties.”

“So, Benjamin, what do you have to say about that?” “Well, I like wearing women’s underwear.

I think she should accept that.”

“Go to hell. I wish I’d never married you.

You’re sick.”

U

London Underground

Better known as “the tube”, the London Underground is the deepest in the world, and connects all of London.

Many of the underground’s arms were used as air raid shelters during the war, and today they provide shelter to many homeless people, young and old.

The toilets are to be avoided at all costs, unless you are looking for quick and anonymous sex after work, and therefore do not want to go round the tearooms, among which the most popular are in Piccadilly Circus and King’s Cross.

V

Robert Venturi

Venturi has been called the father of post-Modernism, although it would be time to call him grandfather.

I can say without fear of contradiction that works like those of Cassarà would never have seen the light, nor would Pop have been accepted at its beginnings if Venturi had not so brilliantly paved the way with his polemical – although today it is difficult to consider it polemical – and very important essay “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture”, which dates back to the early 1960s.

In this work he argued for the need for an eclectic and contradictory architecture, and gave credit to the rhapsodic nature of inspiration rather than the clean geometric tendencies of Modernism, with the didacticism inherent in its straight lines.

The decisiveness with which he exposed his ideas made a return to the past impossible: later in his career, Venturi – together with Denise Scott Brown – began to study Las Vegas and Levittown, and showed the Street a respect that until then had been denied it.

W

Andy Warhol

King Warhol had as much influence on Cassarà as on any artist of his generation and the three that separate them.

Even the artists of Arte Povera, the Italian royal family, cannot deny that their art derives, in part, from Pop Art, even if – and the same goes for Conceptual Art – it was more of a reaction to it.

The good thing Cassarà is doing with the hideous ghost of Warhol and the beaten body of Pop Art is to extract its sharp sting by rebelling against its cynicism, something that is desperately needed at this juncture.

If you look at a group of Cassarà sculptures for a long time, you get the same impression as when you watch Warhol’s film “Chelsea Girls”.

You keep thinking that something important is about to happen, but then you realize that nothing is going to happen and that the importance of the work arises precisely from that absence.

Warhol said it best: “There’s nothing in it.

I’m long-winded and superficial, and I love to be bored.”

X

X, slang for “Extacy”

Designer drug, popular in clubs. Irrevocably linked to House Music. Hidden in the pockets of some of Cassarà’s subjects.

Y

Yesterday

My favorite Beatles song, and it was recorded around the time Cassarà was born.

If we take that as a temporal reference point, the Beatles period, as a musical phenomenon, predates most of Cassarà’s sculpture scenarios by a generation and a half.

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.

Z

Zsa Zsa Gabor

In recent years, Zsa Zsa Gabor has gone from being a faded beauty with many marriages behind her, whose television interviews attracted less attention than her numerous plastic surgeries and her bad taste in men and evening wear, to being an activist on several fronts: sudden attacks on the police – which landed her in prison several times, court battles against Elke Sommer, public declarations of bankruptcy.

ZsaZsa Gabor is an example of what some people will do to attract attention, if they once knew the allure of fame.

Pathetic and sad at the same time, she has become a symbol, for young people, of what they would never want to be.

You will never see a ZsaZsaGabor among Paolo Cassarà’s sculptures.

(Translated by Maria Elena Ruggerini)

Christian Leigh, “Respect for the Street. The Lexicon of Paolo Cassarà: From ‘Androgyny’ to ‘Zsa Zsa Gabor’” in Paolo Cassarà. People, edited by Christian Leigh, exhibition catalogue, Ruggerini & Zonca, Milan 1995.

 

 

The titles of Paolo Cassarà’s scenes in freestanding polychrome terracotta are significant due to what they evoke:

Gisella, Gisellina, Ragazzo alla fermata (boy at the bus stop), Skin Head, Demetra (Demeter), Punk Letteratura Italiana (Italian literature punk), Andrea, Bassista New Wave (New Wave bassist), Rasta, Pusole, Diego, Interno (interior), Anno (year), Federico, Hard Rock Metallaro (hard rock metalhead), Prospero, Studente, Pasquale, Hare Krishna, Rapper, Ultrà Juventus (Juventus hooligan), Ultrà Fiorentino (Fiorentina hooligan), Al biliardo (billiards), Mario, Grazia, Moro, Signora Esposito, Giocatore di pallacanestro (basketball player), Tyaden, Bar Magenta, Domenico, Il Maratoneta (the marathon runner), Monica, Pensieri d’amore (thoughts of love), La signora borghese (the bourgeois lady), Ragazza in spiaggia (girl on the beach), Ragazzo Cubo (cube boy), Lottatori di Sumo (sumo wrestlers), Mina, Free Love, Istante (instant), Bombolo (chubby guy), Sviatoslav Richter, … Like a human play performed by the figures of today’s world.

It is in itself rare that a young man should have such an analytic, well-rounded view.

The fact that he belongs, by age and by choice, to the world that he portrays can be seen in the precision of detail, sports shoe laces, billiard cues, bus stop signpost, tight, frayed jeans, stances, gestures so precise as to be almost humorous, conveying that extra bit of information.

And so, in Paolo Cassarà’s work, scene by scene, we witness the accumulating typification of the elusive worldly appearance of our day, on a reduced scale that renders it colloquial.

And hence the artist plays two cards, like pedal points that anchor his success: eroticism and tenderness, two means of relating from one’s inner depths, in contrast to a superficial world, where all is appearance.

This is the reason why the stories in his play captivate and tempt us, half seeing, half feeling.

Corrado Levi, January 1998, in Paolo Cassarà.

Sembianze Corporee (Paolo Cassarà. Bodily Likenesses), edited by Alberto Fiz, exhibition catalogue, Manuela Nanni gallery, Milan 1998.

 

 

Contemporary art participates in the suffering of the world.

It increasingly represents the dissolution of bodies, the disasters of genetic manipulation, or the sense of profound disquiet towards a system dominated by the artificiality of reality where everything appears manipulable in a progressive loss of meaning, In such a congenial system, it would seem misleading to deal with Paolo Cassarà, a sculptor who apparently moves, or rather skates, on the surface and seems to enjoy pursuing the ephemeral values proposed by fashion.

To paraphrase Andy Warhol, one could say that there is nothing behind the surface.

But it is precisely the surface that interests us since we are in the presence of an artist who does not start from ideology but from form and who is not afraid to communicate tactile and voyeuristic sensations to the viewer.

There are no symbols or abstractions, no allusions or hidden meanings in Cassarà’s work.

Everything unfolds before our eyes without the need to question whether or not it is permissible to reproduce (imitate?) reality.

Cassarà, in short, does not seek artifice. He finds it.

He executes his polychrome terracotta sculptures according to a very ancient technique and almost unconsciously arrives at the postmodern.

The reason is simple: the sculptor does not make

figures but, if anything, figural objects. Bodily appearances, in fact, as the title of this exhibition states, where everything revolves around appearing and not being.

As the French scholar Henri Lefebvre wrote, ‘in practice, objects become signs and signs become objects’ in a continuous shift of primary meanings.

If at an early stage of his work Cassarà’s aim was to portray the universe of youth in a realistic manner, soon the documentary intentions disappeared and his sculptures began to have a life independent of their author.

They occupied the space and imposed themselves as stereotypes of a contemporaneity filtered through the media where apparently uncoded messages appeared strongly connoted.

As Roland Barthes wrote in his famous essay, Myths of Today, the aim is to perceive the hidden messages written in code on the shiny surface of the style and detect them as ‘maps of meaning’.

Cassarà, in short, knows the rules of advertising, and with the soft and not at all aggressive methods of his art, he traps the viewer who, helpless, sets out to observe his sculptures, suffering the charm of the shapes, the softness of the lines and the pleasantness of the colours.

As in the commercials, however, nothing is real and everything is diluted in a mass-media imagery that has its starting point in Warhol’s Marilyn. And he is the first to cynically unmask the system underlying consumption and arrive at a progressive neutralisation of the image. Moreover, Cassarà’s women are also neutral, devoid of any authentic humanity, in an obvious objectification of the female body, androgynous and filiform. There is something politically correct in his research, and his plastic compositions seem to find a theoretical echo in Gilles Lipovetsky’s essay, The Third Woman, in which the birth of a new female creature is announced. In this regard, the French philosopher explains in an interview how ‘for women, the code of thinness has become inseparable from seduction: it is the expression of the desire to control one’s own body and of the declining prestige of motherhood. Winning the battle to keep oneself in line paradoxically makes it possible to reduce the gap between the masculine and the feminine’,

The post-human theorist, Jeffrey Deitch, is not far from this thesis either, stating that in today’s reality ‘we attempt to alter the self rather than cure it’.

And he goes on to observe: ‘We are probably witnessing the dissolution of the Freudian psychological model with its emphatic emphasis on childhood experiences and the family environment’.

Faced with a reality where the body is no more than the most sophisticated part of a mechanism studied in the laboratory, artifice has now become the rule within the framework of an overcoming of the old humanistic concepts.

The interval between life and art within which Robert Rauschenberg wished to act no longer seems to exist in an increasingly enthusiastic adherence to a cybernetic imagination.

It is, therefore, clear at this point how Cassarà acts within the artifice without forgetting the lesson of Jeff Koons or Charles Ray.

If the former recreated a new space of knowledge by using kitsch elements and fragments of popular culture, Ray’s gigantic mannequins confront man with his unresolved sexual complexes.

But the post-human expressed by Cassarà’s works is sweet, sensual, expressly non-violent and, for this reason, it would be a mistake to think that the pursuit of Hollywood models represents one of the Sicilian artist’s objectives.As he suggests, in his early days in the early 1990s, he carefully observed the works of the too-often overlooked artist Athos Ongaro, a ‘robust centaur lost

in post-industrial society’ as Saverio Vertone described him. With Ongaro, Cassarà shares the same sensitivity towards matter and the same tension towards an apparently uncontaminated universe in which form does not intend to depart from acquired linguistic codes.

In both cases we are faced with works that play with the epidermis.

Only, while Ongaro veers towards the mythological dimension, Cassarà chooses the road of the catwalk and creates a series of top models. Or rather, of pop models. Icons, unattainable fetishes, his women are immaterial, evanescent, cybernetic, in an ironic manipulation of forms where to the apocalyptic visions of Damien Hirst or Andres Serrano, Cassarà simply replies with a series of Barbie-style female figures with legs or arms that are too long.

As can be seen in recent compositions such as Sospesa nel vuoto or Nudo di donna of 1997, where a progressive transformation of the body takes place in the exact opposite direction to the expressionist logic.

In this case, the exasperation takes place in the direction desired by the star system pandering to the Schiffer or Campbell models. It is a pity, however, that all this turns out to be ridiculous and paradoxical in the context of a research that, while not concealing its intrinsic pleasantness, appears alienating and not without a subtle veil of disquiet: as in a fairy tale, it is all a dream and the bodies drawn by Cassarà are nothing but a refined projection of the unnatural.

Cherchez la femme, then, and good luck.

Alberto Fiz, ‘Cassarà’s Pop Models’ in Paolo Cassarà.

Sembianze Corporee, edited by Alberto Fiz, exhibition catalogue, Galleria Manuela Nanni, Milan 1998.

Dick Hebdige, Sottocultura, Costa & Nolan, 1990, p. 18.

Interview with Gilles Lipovetslly in L’Espresso of 27 November 1997, p. 119.

Jeffrey Deitch, Post Human, exhibition catalogue exhibited in the museums of Lausanne, Rivoli, Athens, Hamburg, 1992-1993, p.147.

Saverio Vertone, Athos Ongaro, Carini Gallery catalogue, Florence l988.

 

 

Paolo Cassarà was one of the first in Italy (together with occasional fellow travellers such as Paolo Schmidlin) to work with a technique that until yesterday was considered obsolete but today is increasingly revalued as polychrome terracotta with an absolute adherence, bordering on disorientation, to the themes, sensibilities and poetics of contemporary western society.
In fact, since the early 1990s, when he was in his early twenties, Cassarà has decided to symbolically represent his work through sculptures ofdifferent sizes (from the ‘table’ size, still one of his favourites, to life-size portraits or large compositions with several characters),

to symbolically represent, I was saying, today’s world, seen through the eyes of a boy like many others, without ideological screens or conceptual-philosophical blinkers.
Cassarà’s critical and commercial fortune (and also, paradoxically, in certain circles, his misfortune, in times of art’s tragic submission to the ideological prejudices to which thirty years of the avant-garde have fatally forced it) has been precisely that of uniting a technical expertise that has gradually refined over time with an apparent and absolutely spontaneous ‘lightness’ in terms of both content and style.
Since the early 1990s, in fact, the artist has depicted any boys and girls of his generation, with whom he lived, exchanged experiences and ideas and spent evenings and nights clearly ‘serial’ and stereotyped (and yet each one of them unique, original, profoundly different from the others, as only adolescents of all times know how to be, whatever the pundits and psychologists may say) in their fashionable clothes, with Walkmans on their ears, skates, nikes or boots on their feet, jeans sagging over their crotch or super-tight miniskirts, from time to time poised on an ideal (and highly symbolic) street demarcation line or leaning against the counter of a bar (as chance would have it, the Magenta, the historic Milanese bar that remains, generation after generation, the living symbol of an existential passage, of that ambiguous and electrifying crossing that insinuates itself between the second adolescence and the first youth, with all its exuberance of alcohol, drugs, slang, friendships, betrayals and

or in ‘forbidden’ attitudes (as in a chaste kiss between girls or in a silent S&M meditation), but without any facile scandalising effects, or in a suspended attitude of solitary existential reconnaissance, in front of a cup of coffee on an unmade bed (after a night of love or after a night of insomnia for love?), rather than standing in front of an imaginary mirror or in the silence of one’s room.
And then again through the thousands of stereotypes that youth culture has fed us in recent decades: from the post-punk to the skin heads, from the schoolboy returning from school to the new global, from the girl in love to the videomaniac, from the integrated young man with a mobile phone to his ear to the model dressed in Versace.
‘For the clothes, shoes and accessories, but also for the attitudes and character of my characters,’ the artist said in an interview, ’I mainly look at the scenes I see on the street, in bars or in the metro, during the day and especially at night. But fashion magazines, especially women’s magazines, are also an excellent source of inspiration for my work’.
In this way, Cassarà tackled, before others, themes and stylistic modes that, over time, would go from being in the minority to becoming, little by little, a common feeling in the art of our time: such as the focus on everyday, intimate themes, of immediate adherence to our ‘banal’ everyday reality with all the value, also social and political (after all, wasn’t it already said in the 1970s that private is political? ), that this return to concrete reality, even minimal, has for all of us all the more so today, when not only the great social changes, but also the slight shifts in values and meanings, from the family to sex to intergenerational relations, are revealed in all their dramatic nature precisely in everyday life, in ‘our’ most private places, between school desks (where violence and private inter-student conflicts increase, or between students and professors, and ‘political’ ones decrease) or within domestic walls (where discomfort and psychological violence increase); or as, by way of anticipation, in the recourse (and return) to an art form that is recognisable to all, that is adherent to the reality of youth not only from the point of view of the themes dealt with, but also from that of technique and style: not a forcibly ‘contemporary’ technique (like the myriads of photographs or videos with which the so-called ‘trendy’ galleries have filled the fairs in recent years, and which are already disappearing), but rather a technique that is both cultured and popular, with several levels of cross-reading: ancient and highly refined from the point of view of style (terracotta, that of the great Lombard tradition), but extraordinarily popular and ‘youthful’ in its running after current fashions, in its perfect mimicry (in colours and shapes) of the clothes of little girls in the street, and in its fatal camouflage with the thousands of figurines and characters to be found in toy and model shops, the many little pagan goddesses that have come out of role-playing games the fantasy gladiators created, with maniacal precision, by the thousand anonymous artisans of children’s games, the extraordinary lolita’s borrowed from the pages of Japanese manga that drive millions of teenagers around the world crazy.
Lately, however, this chronachistic fidelity to certain environments and situations of youth has seemed to fade to some extent, in favour of an accentuation of the ironic register on the one hand, and of an ever-increasing stylisation, which owes its debt to the past to Art Nouveau, as well as to pop (but also to certain romantic and pre-Romantic aesthetics).
A stylisation that has recently also infiltrated the artist’s choice of material: no longer only and exclusively terracotta, but also resin, used to create sculptures that are deliberately identical to each other, in limited series (of only 4 or 5 pieces, generally), each coloured differently, to accentuate, with an increasingly strong sense of disorientation, the ‘serial’ character imposed by fashion on adolescents, their, perhaps inevitable, conformism in a society that has based much of its existence on the brand and the label (therefore on flattening).
‘After all,’ says the artist, ’aren’t the models we see every day on the pages of magazines also unreal, increasingly unreal? Skinny to the point of anorexia, made-up, diaphanous, almost ghosts, replicants.

And just as many replicants seem to be the teenagers who try to imitate them’.

Cassarà is thus, today, both a cantor of the youth universe from the inside and a far from uncritical observer of it, a protagonist of the made-in-Italy revolution and a ruthless analyst of its infinite conformisms.
He is, above all, a refined sculptor and a hyper-popular artist, who speaks to the young people of his age and those of the generations below him in a language that is both extremely simple and complex, as only truly original artists are naturally able to do.

Alessandro Riva, ‘Semidee in forma seriale’ in Paolo Cassarà, curated by Alessandro Riva, exhibition catalogue, Marella Arte Contemporanea, Milan 2002.

 

It is likely that if I had had to curate this exhibition directly, the choice of works would have been different.

In fact, I strongly wanted it, conceived as they say, not only to document a conscious aesthetic, an intention, not a revelation of the subconscious, starting from the end of the last century, but to find sources and bear witness to research of a higher formal dignity than the photographic display of homosexuality in the promotional campaigns of fashion designers, who, if not art, direct the right.

The almost obsessive invasion of provocative male nudes has taken over the field of female nudes in newspapers and advertisements, dominant until recently.

And so the path from von Gloeden to Pierre et Gilles has highly motivated and aesthetically defined formal reasons as a genre, without concerns of ghetto, and, indeed, with a linguistic rather than contentual unscrupulousness.

There is no doubt that Baron von Gloeden defined the boundaries of his poetics through the medium of photography in years when photography had only a documentary, positivistic function.

Long before it entered art as a technique applied to an idea, as a pure medium, with Man Ray or Rodcienko, von Gloeden entrusted it with an absolute expressive responsibility, not only of recording reality, but of intercepting dreams, myth, desire.

There is no doubt that von Gloeden’s photographs are not just photographs, but are indications of taste, of sensitivity, of a vision not previously revealed.

They first appeared, to my knowledge, in 1978 in Spoleto.

The heir of one of the young men who had been close to von Gleoden in Taormina kept numerous photographic plates with children posing as athletes and gods of the ancient world.

The plates, with some original prints, were offered to Lucio Amelio, an enterprising contemporary art dealer, who immediately realised their extraordinary importance.

He bought them and exhibited them in a historic free port of homosexual culture: the Spoleto festival.

Thirty years have passed since then, and those images of handsome, poor young men with big hands and dirty feet have entered, as forerunners, into the repertoire of the gay imagination.

They are the end of original sin.

Wilhelm von Gloeden is, therefore, at the origins of a freedom prefigured in Winckelmann’s icy neoclassical world where male beauty is always ideal, not real.

He reproduces the myth, but he finds it on earth, in real, genuine, tasty boys, posed by him without disguises, like Caravaggio’s bacchis or cupids. Von Gloeden adopts the easy disguise of myth to give historical foundation to his desire.

But literature had long ago provided an exemplary model, shameless and ironic, unsurpassed in the oral tradition: Oscar Wilde. Scandals, trials, homosexual love affairs, and imprisonment defined an unrepeatable personality.

And in that climate, in that condition of originality, it is perfectly consistent for a hypersensitive and highly refined artist like Aubrey Beardsley to be formed.

It is with the insertion of some plates for Salome (1893) that my counterpoint begins, my alternative itinerary with respect to the one traced, with a different aesthetic sensitivity, by Eugenio Viola when he began this troubled and curious (in a literal sense) enterprise under the guidance of Alessandro Riva, which personal events, not yet clarified, led astray.

The original orientation marked by the very peculiar use of photography drew the young curator into a very up-to-date and very informed, but predominantly photographic, selection up to Pierre et Gilles. Difficult in that long journey, with progressive liberation of prejudices, especially in the America of the second post-war, from Bruce of Los Angeles to Mapplethorpe, find space for allusive, less explicit, more literary texts, but charged with erotic tension and a very strong sexual ambiguity.

I would then, perhaps by avoiding ancient painting and its homoerotic suggestions, have referred back to the closest Pre-Raphaelites, or to Gustave Moreau, to Franz von Stuck, to Hans von Marèes, in a more insinuating path.

Thus entered, without method, but by consonances and elective affinities, are works that document or declare their ambiguous or shameless origin: some sculptors of the 1930s such as Valmore Gemignani, Eugenio Baroni, Bruno Innocenti, pleased with the harmony of the naked male body; Guglielmo Anni, Leonor Fini, Filippo De Pisis, Varlin; and again Tono Zancanaro, Giovanni Testori, Paolo Vallorz, Massimo Rao, Lino Frongia, Filippo Dobrilla.

The exhibition thus unfolds in an interweaving of photography and painting, of declared and sometimes brazen gestures, and of sensations, atmospheres, allusions, expressed by the painters.

What we find in literature in Kavafis, Penna or Wilcock is less easy to find in painting, where the body also appears; and because we are not athletes of the Italic forum, models of healthy sporting homosexuality, but lewd and impudent youths like von Gloeden’s models, in nature, we must wait for De Pisis’ homosexual diary, which sometimes closes its impudent pages with comments and memories of lost emotions and pleasures, which lasted a moment. And sometimes also painful, annoying, memorable in a negative way.

Sudden happiness, melancholy notes, through memory, in rapid sketches, of possessed bodies, De Pisis.

And it is a story of swift and rapacious love, of which Pier Paolo Pasolini will give us proof, to the point of martyrdom, like a modern Saint Sebastian.

If always Dionysian, in the memory on paper, is De Pisis’s troubled impensiero, Apollonian, in his fundamental inspiration, in his boxer footballers, in his enchanted Figura d’aprile, is Guglielmo Janni, who did not fail to measure himself against a classically inspired Saint Sebastian.

Janni is truly a paradigm:’

One can’t count Janni’s disturbing snapshots, young men all curly-haired, wide-eyed and athletic skulls, mouths distorted.

Violent lives.

Athletes, footballers (don’t forget that 1934 is the year of Italy as world champion), feverish young men’ (Mario Fagiolo dell’Arco).

A counterpoint to Janni, less direct, less shameless, and probably the bearer of an unconscious homosexual sensibility is the rare Sardinian painter Brancaleone da Romana. The two examples in the exhibition, Pensieri tristi (Sad Thoughts) and Giovani assorto (Absorbed Youth), are masterpieces of literature in painting, expressions of disturbances, secret thoughts, repressed inclinations to which the painter gives form almost unconsciously.

Without the morbid ambiguity of Janni, Brancaleone conceives and expresses in his models the same duplicity as Caravaggio: Declared virility, overshadowed homosexuality.

We will find this unresolved, but perceivable, even uncomfortably modern condition in Lucian Freud. While it is boldly declared in Varlin (in the Apollonian and Dionysian image of Alain at the same time), in Colombotto Rosso, in Testori, in Vallorz (who dares to represent, in painting, the impudent image of the transsexual).

Leonor Fini and Sylvano Bussotti cultivate ambiguity in images of exhausted elegance.

Safer and more direct is the homosexual opsine of Lorenzo Tornabuoni and Filippo Dobrilla, both Tuscans, both Michelangelo-esque who look at the naked male body as a divine image of incorruptible beauty.

For their Ribera, a realist painter of old flesh, it must be a monster.

Still and always feminine and explicit, in his happy, singing painting, is Lino Frongia, for whom homosexuality is, literally,

‘loving friendship; friendship, not loneliness, disturbance, melancholy as in the lunar and delicate Massimo Rao.

Or necrophilic vision, memento mori, sex-sin-death, as in Agostino Arrivabene.

Again, among the painters, the Germans Rainer Fetting and Klaus Mehrkens interpret an expressionist canon, and the Italians Marco Luzi and Stefano Mosena, while Bas Meerman and Norbert Bisky play with irony.

Young sculptors also cultivate, between modesty (Aaron Demetz) and complacency (Livio Scarpella), sexual themes with explicit awareness. Paolo Schmidlin goes as far as caricature, with desecrating and morbid taste.

More ironic, and almost comical, is Paolo Cassarà.

The exhibition now confronts, with equal dignity, challenging works that painters and sculptors have conceived in the transport of a new vitality of homosexual subjects, for a long time veiled, overshadowed, implied, even in devotional iconographies (as extensively stated), and the quick, swift photographic documents, from Bruce of Los Angeles to David LaChapelle, that have given definitive legitimacy to the homosexual world protagonist, unchallenged in the aesthetic and commercial spheres.

From a still provocative idea, which generates morbid curiosity, between pride and sin, between a sense of belonging and a sense of guilt, to the effort of an articulated and complex exhibition, rich and curious, inevitably incomplete and imperfect. An internal and an external point of view, shared images and discussed images, research into the complexity of the expression of traditional forms of art and in the immediacy, naturally instantaneous, of photography: an exhibition with two heads, which look at each other with suspicion, which do not ask to integrate, which are not complementary but become so.

This is, now, this difficult exhibition, monument and document with its laborious elaboration and the regret of not having challenged the most difficult enterprises, pushing itself to the sanctuaries of the greatest painting, not homosexual, but universal of the last century: Schiele, Bacon, Freud.

In front of them, in front of us, we could not not say gay.

 

 

The media incident that has done the most to bring Paolo Cassarà’s work into the public eye in recent years has proved to be his involvement in the controversy surrounding the much-talked-about exhibition Arte e omosessualità, created and promoted by Milan’s Councillor for Culture at the time, Vittorio Sgarbi.

The artist appeared with his Pietà, a medium-sized polychrome terracotta sculpture depicting a woman sitting, in men’s clothes, clutching an inflatable doll in her lap.

The work was immediately branded as a “Lesbian Pietà” by the press (Maurizio Giannattasio, Corriere della Sera, 12 July 2007) and was censored by Mayor Letizia Moratti, together with two other works (Miss Kitty by Paolo Schmidlin and Silvio Sircana’s enhanced photograph), preordaining the closure of the exhibition in Milan from the day after its opening if it was not cleansed of these “indecent” works.

Even the Honourable Silvio Berlusconi intervened in the fracas, called upon by Sgarbi to mediate with “Sister Letizia” and her censorship; his proposal was a compromise, whereby just one work, albeit a significant one, should be removed from the exhibition: Cassarà’s sculpture (the very same!), for its “lesbian” interpretation (Maurizio Gianattasio, Corriere della Sera, 14 July 2007).

However, the mediation failed, and the indignant Sgarbi decided to remove the entire exhibition elsewhere in Italy (Palazzina Reale, near the Santa Maria Novella railway station in Florence —Ed.).

This led to Cassarà’s Pietà being published and cited on a daily basis for almost a month in the national press (from Corriere della Sera to La Repubblica, Il Giornale to Il Giorno, Libero to Metro), where it was the object of discussion and reinterpretation, and was deemed blasphemous and scandalous.

Indeed, provocation was the artist’s aim and intention, so as to convey a message of protest against the Church and the political class (Armando Stella, Corriere della Sera, 15 July 2007).

In the magazine Made, Paolo Cassarà admits his true intentions: “While working on this sculpture I deliberately sought provocation through its symbolism and through the indirect citation of well-known religious iconography.

My original aim was to constructively provoke, so as to raise public awareness around the issue of homosexuality, and certainly not to achieve some kind of personal promotion”.

The sculpture arose from a desire to play with the classic symbolism of the Pietà, but it is not meant to overlap with its famous namesake by Michelangelo.

“The work,” continues the artist, “can be interpreted on different levels, not just as lesbian or religious.

I wanted to expose the difficult issues of today’s society: an allegory on the commoditisation of women, given the same consideration as a blow-up doll, on the depreciation of relationships and sex, on the solitude that is pervading people.

The work certainly involves a fair amount of ambiguity in the exchange of roles of the two androgynous figures, but introspection into the universe of femininity has always been one of the cornerstones of the artist’s research, and here he approaches with irony and almost a touch of the “comical” (Vittorio Sgarbi), the role of the woman, removed from her function of producing offspring, a woman alienated in the very perception of her own body, which becomes a symbol and an object of consumption in the new sense.

Vade Retro Gay!, interview by Federico Poletti, Made 05, N. 26, December / January 2008.

ibid.

Vittorio Sgarbi, Vade retro  in “Arte e Omosessualità. Da von Gloeden a Pierre et Gilles”, Electa,  

Milan 2007.

 

 

Following the avalanche of controversies and debates, re-opens – this time in Florence – the most discussed and chatted exhibition of recent years: Art and Homosexuality. From von Gloeden to Pierre et Gilles. After the curator Eugenio Viola, Exibart met Paolo Schmidlin and Paolo Cassarà.

Two of the artists put to the index by Letizia Moratti …

After much controversy, the exhibition reopens in its full version.

What do you think about it? What are your expectations? Paolo Cassarà: The enthusiasm is perhaps a bit ‘passed after all that has happened, although I was delighted that the show was welcomed by Florence, a city known throughout the world for the great artistic tradition.

It is certainly a failure for the City of Milan and for a city that has always been open and cosmopolitan.

I hope that the exhibition in the new Florentine headquarters is welcomed with interest and assessed for the quality of the works, beyond the controversy.

I would like to become a traveling exhibition, a project exported abroad.

How did you experience this affair, both from a human and a professional point of view? P.C.

Initially I was happy and excited for all the interest the press has created around the event, which rarely happens for the art world. Then the situation changed and I was overwhelmed by the media brawl, which went far beyond the works.

As an artist I have felt in many ways instrumentalized and my work has been talked about too much in a distorted way, with interpretations very far from my intentions.

We have arrived at readings of univocal and paradoxical works, extremisms that have come to entitle my work Pietà lesbo.

Some thought it was a planned desktop scandal, a way for some artists to promote their art … P.C.

In preparing the work I deliberately focused on provocation, through its symbolism and the indirect quotation of a famous religious iconography. My original intent was to provoke constructively, to sensitize the public on the issue of homosexuality, and certainly not a form of personal promotion.

How did you experience the relationship with the creator of the Vittorio Sgarbi initiative and the curator Eugenio Viola? P.C.

Sgarbi did what he could in defending the show with great enthusiasm, but in the end the situation got out of hand.

The Assessor has in some ways taken over the curator, taking charge of the initiative and all its consequences.

He covered the curator’s role, putting him aside a little and therefore, globally, there was little dialogue with them.

The media spectacularization has then canceled all the roles in a great polemical fuss. What do you think of the title of the exhibition, Vade Retro. Art and Homosexuality?

P.C. The Vade Retro title undoubtedly has a histrionic tone, it is a provocative slogan.

And as such it must be understood.

How was your work originally meant to be interpreted and how did the idea come about?

P.C. The idea came from wanting to play on a symbology known to everyone.

This is why I called it Pietà, and not as a reference to the famous work of Michelangelo.

My work represents a woman holding an inflatable doll in her arms, where ambiguity and the exchange of roles in these androgynous figures are strong.

The work can be interpreted according to different levels and not only in a lesbian or religious sense.

In my intentions it wants to be a denunciation of the discomforts of the present society: an allegory of the commodification of the woman,

considered as an inflatable doll, of the decadence of relationships and of sex, of the loneliness that pervades people.

All themes that we live and on which I liked to reflect.

What is the aspect of the exhibition that you did not like and what the work that made you think? P.C.

Many works are valid and full of ideas; the penalizing aspect was the preparation. Photography was perhaps part of the project that gave back an idea of ​​true and contemporary aesthetics.

Among the photos I think of Paul Smith for the great emotional impact and the unsettling effect.

In the future, where do you wish to expose your censored work? P.C.

The exhibition deserved to be exported abroad.

It could have been an international project of great resonance if the media chaos had been better managed.

It was a missed opportunity.

We will see now what will happen in Florence.

The city, which has always been a cradle for art, is certainly at the height and has proved to be much more open and welcoming than Milan.

 

 

What’s Gucci my nigga?
What’s Louis my killa?
What’s drugs my deala?
What’s that jacket, Margiela? Doctors say I’m the illest
Cause I’m suffering from realness

recite the verses of a famous song by Kayne West and Jay-Z, well-known rappers and fashion victims.

Light verses only in appearance, since they paint the fashion system as an incubator for individuals sick of reality, ashes that smolder the fire as for the sculptures of Paolo Cassarà, who with shapes painted now in cellulose pulp and terracotta, now in wood and resin, tell of a female universe where reality is extreme and sometimes anticipated: her Chatta con me is prophetic, which portrays a young mother intent on chatting, almost sucked into her phone (and therefore herself), absolutely regardless of the fact that her son, blood of her blood, is drowning there, right behind his hunched and relaxed back (she even gives him her back), in an implosion that drowns him in the foam of her bath; a chilling fact of crime has staged what Cassarà had previously sculpted with a frightening lucidity.

And this is precisely her touch, her irreverent and highly polished figure at the same time, glossy enough to pass from the story of the woman dressed princely Dolce & Gabbana or the “Woman in red” in perennial balance between elegance and fetishism, to the two overweight sisters obsessed with models that magazines and media offer, and again to the workaholic so absorbed by her obsession that she decides to take cocaine on a device that looks like her tablet, or to the DJ who shows herself more than her work, women who society commodifies and who allow themselves to be commodified, dominated and subverted by it, in a passive and inexorable ritual, where fashion, and the whole market, become jailers towards whom the victims, through a wicked use of the system, nourish impulses of infinite and boundless love, so much so as to set aside not only love for others but even self-love.

Cassarà, with his lucid irony, does not demonize or demolish the overt communicative potential of the fashion system, rather it reveals its improper use by the user, the massive and distorted effect that impacts on lives to the point of re-discussing the scale of values, or for better to say negative values.

Emblematic is the work Happy shopping day (among other things perfectly fitting with the ultra-oceanic era of the very American Black Friday), which portrays a woman prisoner of her chador intent on pushing a supermarket trolley, presumably legitimized by the wealthy husband to buy anything, even a child, except to accept his condition as a submissive and recluse.

In this sense, the choral nature of Cassarà’s sculptures, where each story told is different from the other but at the same time linked and consequential, as in a Dante’s circle without songs, is well expressed even in an oxymoronic key, the one that sculpts the whiteness of the tutu white of a white dancer who has been denied the word through an accessory typical of bondage practices Ballerina, dance, night Grand Gala All eyes on you, the stars see you later, go Dance with the Moon as it clings to you But the collar is so tight it’ll kill you Dance To the dull rhythm of the wind A skirt like this, just so white A woman like this, but just like that mom the singer Madame writes, the women of Cassarà are mothers, workers, dancers with unusual outfits, fashionistas, hedonists and narcissists, fetishists with a look worthy of Roman Polański’s Mimì di Gallmountain, beautifully unaware of what they live and what awaits them.

The exhibition is completed by the series of shoes, where red and stiletto heels are the masters, which is self-evident reference, but not mere quotation, to the awareness campaign for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, celebrated every 25th November.

 

 

For over thirty years now, the sculptor Paolo Cassarà, of Sicilian origins, but naturalized in Milan, has dedicated himself with passion and continuity to the art of the chisel, updating his catalog of subjects to the types and characters that characterize our modern society.

If in the first years of his objective research of Cassarà it was to represent in a realistic way the youth and adolescent universe in all its forms and its tics (from street kids in blue jeans to young people in sporty but trendy clothing) in the second phase of his research, along with the new social actors, the sculptor’s point of view has also changed.

An element that has become increasingly accentuated in the reinterpretation of reality has been the confrontation with cross- media culture – from traditional to digital communication, up to the overwhelming emergence of social media – which has imposed increasingly more identification models and forms of behavior, schematic and standardized.

This is even more true for the female universe which, thanks to the Pink Revolution of this era, not only gained emancipation in civil and interpersonal relationships, but is also rapidly climbing the peaks of economic, professional and social independence.

Contemporary women have become the new heroines of worldly life who in turn feel the need to identify with the models imposed by media communication. Among these models, the icon of the successful businesswoman stands out, embodied by the terracotta sculpture Milan at 9.30, a fascinating career woman who runs to work elegantly wrapped in a pastel green trench coat, with black gloves and knee-high boots, cell phone in hand and the open handbag that lets out a box of Prozac.

Or here is the glamorous and sensual icon embodied by the seductive Valentina, a femme fatale with a boho-chic francesina yoke in tight baby doll and hold-ups who takes a selfie in front of a huge baroque mirror.

Here the woman is no longer a character, but an interpretation of the role of herself, that of the supermodel who parades on the catwalks or the influencer always present at social events, the undisputed star of social networks, who places herself both in the role of “vamp”, showing off the latest creations of the fashion brands. Today, influencers are, as the journalist Anna Dello Russo defines them, “tabloid vivants” because just like newspaper advertisements, they are a marketing vehicle but, at the same time, they influence and direct consumers’ tastes.

Together with successful women and influencers, the sculpture also stages a large repertoire of fashion (or social) victims of everyday life, those who in some way are the target audience of the icons of social networks, from young wiry girls and make- up to elegant young ladies in tight dresses and stiletto tips, from middle-aged ladies who make up in the mirror or who enjoy a cocktail at the bar to managers who hurry to the airport with a trolley.

Not only Western women, but also Muslim women with their faces covered by burqas, as it is always easier to meet on the street or in the supermarket: this is the case of Happy shopping day in which an oriental woman goes shopping accompanied by her son intent on throwing in air an airplane.

 Not only single women but also mothers, as in Chat with me, which sculpts the drama of today’s obsession with social networks and which seems to have anticipated a news story that really happened in Tel Aviv by a few months, where a 23- year- single mother comes arrested by Israeli police on suspicion of chatting on Facebook while her 6-month-old daughter drowned in the bathtub.

Careful investigator of the customs and rituals of contemporary society, on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, which is celebrated every 25 November, Paolo Cassarà has created a new collection of red terracotta shoes, pieces unique life-size décolleté and high-heeled wedges that, in addition to reflecting beauty, tell stories of female strength and resilience.

Cassarà’s sculptures therefore seem to restore this great humanity and versatility in the representation of women, responding to two different feminine ideals: that of the career woman, of the affirmed and independent influencer and that of the woman and mother who plays a domestic and at the same time it regains its own femininity through the confrontation / clash with the models of the network.

Perfectly at ease with a difficult and ancient technique such as terracotta modeling, Paolo Cassarà is able to acquire a virtuosity and a mimetic ability to make his works dynamic and light, reproducing every tiniest detail with the same plasticity and ductility that expresses the processing of today’s materials.

With Milan at 9.30 and with Donna in rosso the mimesis of reality and the naturalness of the pose reaches a level of technical skill that recalls some examples of the hyper-realistic sculpture of John De Andrea, Duane Hanson and Ron Mueck.

Despite this, the “truer than truth” sculptures of the hyperrealists appear almost cold, detached and distant compared to the ability to grasp the quid of the single figure and at the same time the universality of a condition as it appears in Cassarà’s work.

At the same time, any comparison with Alan Jones’s Sixties Pop sculpture as with the current one by Takashi Muratami appears limiting with respect to the complexity and variety of cultural and linguistic references implemented by the artist.

The meticulous depiction of the external appearance, the representation of plastic strength and elegant grace are combined in the sculptor’s works, recalling both the monumentality and the solemnity of the formal schemes of Greco-Roman statuary and the lightness of the fashionable figures of fashion design, enriched by the most glamorous accessories and charms.

This is the miracle of the naturalness of Cassarà’s contemporary sculpture.

 

 

The simplest and most direct way to present this exhibition is to start with its title: SHADES OF LIFE. It is not just a question of the real. Between artistic methods and techniques, there is the same distinction that exists between reflection on a certain subject and the composition itself. It is implicit in the structure of the first of the two terms, where the notion ‘shadows of life’ explicitly reveals its significance as a discourse on the real.
Just as life-forms are the study of the appearance of being, or psychology is the study of the psyche, shadow is not only a question of mirroring the real – or better still, the resemblance of being – of method (and techniques), it refers, that is to say, to that part of the logic of the image that has as its object the ontological specularity of art itself: the signs of recognition and the formal conditions, which underlie artistic research and enable us to convey, systematise and enhance our perceptions.
This exhibition is not intended to be a definitive economy of the media image. Historiographers are already dealing with this topic. If the contemporary exhibition curatorship asks itself what contribution the media image in progress, the psychology of the iconic form, the eros of the mystical sign and the sculptural object of the imago can make, the question must also be asked of aesthetics and photography. And the media image must strive to answer the question. Nor is the exhibition intended to be a method of exhorting the religion of the real. Dealing with the image, in digital society, is as necessary as it is to govern the self of ‘one’s sensor’ in the use of AI or one’s smartphone; many artists are already moving in this direction. But behind the problems of mediality there are economic and technological issues. A technology of the image is not even conceivable without the question of aesthetics as its basis.
This trilogy intends to deal with those questions that, arising from speculation on the media image, concern aesthetics and a-retinal expansion. Shadows of Life. The Real does not debate questions of iconic or aniconic address. It takes its starting point from the conviction that these cannot be resolved solely in the light of utilitarian elements and that they can only be resolved by addressing the underlying issues. It is a question of when and where in contemporary art the problem of the image and its relationship to reality or to the object of its representation arises, and how the individual works of Paolo Cassará, Giorgio Lupattelli and Moreno Ovani relate to their reflections and specularity. One has to ask oneself what the goal of the current art crisis is, what the conception of art making is, how to set up relations with the world and one’s neighbour.

N.b.: In addition, the exhibition has something to report to the very spirit of exhibition and fruition in the happy news of curator Gabriele Perretta’s latest book. When is an exhibition a real landmark? When it can say within its own dialectical statement: The sensor that does not see. On the loss of perceptual immediacy (book published at the end of 2023 by the Milan-based publisher, Paginauno).

 

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