ASTOLFO FUNES /HISTORIAS DE VIDA
from 15/11/2008 to 10/12/2008
BY DORES SACQUEGNA.
Observing the cycle of selected works for this exhibition devoted to Astolfo Funes, I cannot make to remember Antonin Artaud in his prophetic "theater of the double."
A text that introduced the tied up enigmatic formalities to hidden and mysterious strengths of the shades: a double that digs in the nighttime states of the being, climbing in the divine harmonious sphere or going down in the deepest abysses of the emergency.
The double in the theater refers to a scene of replied life and proposal as moment of opening toward the outside. This also happens in a lot of works of this young author.
The sceneries are like dream, at times exasperated, fleeing, paradoxical.
Also he as Artaud it tries to find answers in the "female terrible" through the dicotomy that exists between beauty and horror, construction and destruction, pleasure and sin.
It is in these sceneries from the baroque colors they sink the most intimate human emotions, passions, emotions but also social appeals, setting the multilevel accent of reality, with the intent to reveal truth and artifice and withdrawing from the actuality , as in a game of mirrors, real and imaginary, fiestas and claustrophobic desolations.
Astolfo, puts us in front of his works, as you testifies silent of a theater of human emotions. For some verses (layout of the color and subjects) his art remembers us the Art Brut, coined by the artist and collector Jean Dubuffet, and reported to that subjects that succeed in producing visions that they are set as it "truth" in the art as a sort of revelation of a trial that diverts from the native run of the forms starting in a run of ordinary madness.
But it is not Art Brut and not even Outsider. It is pure obsession, of an artist that lives the insane feeling, if we want to tell it this way, to invade the space with estranging colors that creates a short-circuit among the vision in itself and the action in the work.
To narrate the states of mind and above all certain inquetitudinis, due to histories of women, of loves and of abandonments, of desire and of drunkenness, of alcohol or game, it is the modus operands that it distinguishes his work.
Worldliness, space, worldliness, are elements around which the human being builds the really itself. I’s a map that is undertaken in the knowledge of itself same, in an unusual thick trip and without a precise destination, that goes over the rational logic and it is tense to modify the concepts or the notions of liberty, identity, health, illness, madness.
Our artist, when he meets the world, himself meets.
He assimilates concepts of life and human behaviors related to existential uneasiness, discomforts or difficulty and it extrapolates them from a precise context for then to reproduce them with to make voyeuristic way, of whom curious in the life of the others, socially showing some of these aspects of common people or different people, with their tragedians or common existences, setting them under the reflectors of a kind of theater of the absurdity, made of suspended personality in the time.
And its certainly interesting to notice that - as many contemporary artists his contemporaries - draws thematic tied up to the body and his identity, with social lapels that reflect the separation that exists among substance and appearance.
The art of Astolfo Funes, points out a possible "double" of the life: a trans-figuration as reproduction of the reality and her figuration.
A hot thermometer on the art in which it would be useful to not only question us on the star system leveled by the mediatic models and aesthetical but also on certain "alienations" and madness that involve in before person today`s individual.
The Artist
ASTOLFO FUNES
Photo Gallery
Piano
