BELLINZONA, SWITZERLAND.-On Saturday September 24, 2005 at 5:30 pm opens at CACT Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Ticino in Bellinzona the thematic show entitled Contemporanea Giovani. Feedback: Barbara DePonti, Francesca Guffanti, Sebastiano Mauri, Attilio Solzi. The exhibition has been wanted by the promoters of Contemporanea Giovani Tre [just opened last July the 20th at the Pinacoteca Civica in Como] in collaboration with CACT in Bellinzona. The aim is to create a link between Como (Italy) and Bellinzona (Switzerland), believing in cultural and regional differences and exchanges.

As far as the current tour is concerned, CACT has selected 4 authors already shown in Como within the previous edition in 2004. The goal is to present their art works following curatorial criteria, which allow to put into evidence many aspects of the creative process. Besides, the interaction with different professional contexts aims to increase the comparative effects, by stating that artistic creativity doesn’t run the role of product only, but continues to develop within history and independently from other geographies. The curator determines and justifies with his own thematic set up the mechanism of osmotic approach based on the relation between public and artist. He more or less consciously denounces a plausible age of art, meant as product/fetish. By integrating artist’s visions within those of the curator, it is possible to outline the creative process and increase the mobility of the interpretative thinking.

Contemporanea Giovani has represented in the last years in Como an innovative event. Its promoters caught and felt since the beginning – thankful to public financial support – the need to highlight the production of contemporary art and create a network of young artistic propositions [more or less alternative and/or more or less different].

One of the targets of the curators has also been to create a condition of interdependency among regions by involving other contemporary art centres or institutions, in order to keep ourselves distant from the system of art – by detaching ourselves from given definitions and by relating the most possible with a wide heterogeneous network in the framework of audiovisual arts.

The aim of this collaboration doesn’t constitute a sort of cloning or repetitive procedure, but rather the will to detect an individual artistic procédé within a confrontation system. Therefore the project goes over to Switzerland: an atypical and innovative marketplace, above all as far as the fruition of the work of art and its multifaceted interpretation opportunities are concerned.

Without entering to much into the thematic details of the show – we can summarize with the confrontation between the artist and themselves inside a specific social network –, this exhibition asks important questions not only to artists, but to cultural operators too. What is the role an official and more or less independent exhibition space has to play today? Which is the principal meaning of the making art exhibitions in outdoor contexts? Which are the management tasks and the targets of a curator compared to artist’s visions within hysterical art markets? In which manner can all this positively develop along a concept of authority or authenticity?

CACT selected and presents four Italian artists, whose work was already shown during Contemporanea Giovani 2 in 2004. They are Barbara DePonti, Francesca Guffanti, Sebastiano Mauri, Attilio Solzi. The Centro tried to make a choice out of Mediterranean authors, who – because of their being Italian and therefore conscious of their own “geography” – are strongly related to the tradition of painting and architecture, even if the media they use include video and reflect a concept based on installation focused on the idea of art and space, or more generally of “sign in the space”. It is interesting to gather how the concept of globalization, extended to the one of international style, is not able to cancel the original roots of an artist, its geographic and cultural space, its history and historical consciousness.

The dark urban visions of Barbara DePonti find the light from the folding of the paper previously painted. For her, folding means consuming the layer of pigment she put on the sheet of paper, in order to make the original colour coming out again. Its surface seems to be scratched to indicate the intimate (suburban) suffering of the artist in/for the place where she lives. Her architectural views reveal the difficult relation mankind/city through gloomy and unhealthy representations, as they already became projections of the memory consumed within the time passing.

Completely different is the recent work of Francesca Guffanti around the children’s universe. Apparently playful and coloured, the paintings report, like in a diary, scenes of children who play, eat and/or who are busy within their almost trans-real, and yet, daily dimensions. Francesca Guffanti draws the impressions she catches from the children world and like impressions she illustrates their behaviours. Because of a certain effect of transparency, precarious definition and lack in details, the artist re-outlines the lightness of another reality within the everyday life.

Sebastiano Mauri uses for this occasion the video, even if his creative procedure still is partly related to painting. Caught by the Portrait, with the work Faded, 2004 the artist succeeds in putting into deep evidence the study on the expressions and metamorphoses, by featuring two faces, one near to the other (and slight projected), as if it was a sort of open book. Showing portraits images fading between high and low definition, Mauri wants to allude to a bipolar and opposite relation human/animal. Entirely audio video is the second work entitled The Song I Love To, 2005: simply shot using a steady camera, the viewer sees a series of characters in an immobile exposure, as if they were life sequences. In the background the sound track is a love song each character has chosen as an important symbol of his memory. We are again in front of an interesting contrast and division among different expressions, behaviours [sometimes banal and apparently boring] and universal visions of love unequivocally related to the human dimension expressed by the sentimentality of the song.
With the video works entitled Sommario del tedio and Guida per un Punk domestico, Attilio Solzi puts ironically on stage the nobility and solemnity of a popular existence, low popular and highly decadent, through which he reports our every day utopia, visions and ghosts. Solzi – through a realistic [he reminds us Pasolin’s worki] and almost rough and offensive reproduction of the emotions of the people, whom he depicts, interviews and transforms into unconscious actors – intelligently points out the concept of making art today, of the artistic product related to the so called official exhibition spaces. We can state that the artist already overcame the medium he uses, overcoming as well – with a remarkable attitude of resistance – all sorts of artistic centrality.