LORENZO SCOTTO DI LUZIO
Senza Titolo
11.12.2012 - 02.02.2013
Opening: 08.12.2012, 6-9 pm
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In the mid-70s, the young Carmelo Bene spoke in an interview about Buster Keaton and said: “If one imagines the earth as a sphere whose surface is utterly covered with Soap, obviously one cannot prevent from slipping”.
The image Carmelo Bene gives of Buster Keaton can also function as a prologue for the work of Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio who, on this slippery surface, is slipping himself. He, too, like an actor of silent movies or a mime artist, is tide-up on the tug of war, he is slamming against a glass door or he is climbing on a ladder even though there is no rope, no glass door and no ladder. Due to his subtle humor the slapstick is breaking the authoritarian, disillusioning act of the ritual.
The recurring aspect of his work is the simulation of something that is so credible that the perception of reality itself is called into question. His staging of fiction correspond with the parody of a drama, not only in content but also in the methodology, in which the hyper-realistic results and the production of these objects are more reminding of the work from a baker as from a sculptor. Instead of a conceptual minimalism, a baroque narrative adheres to them, which still performs an anticipation on several levels. With this deconstructive attitude towards a standardized semiology Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio repeatedly eludes from any categorization of contemporary artistic production.
But why is the earth´s surface for some people so slippery? Why is there a gap between the representation of reality and reality itself?
Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio’s works confront the meaning of experience in a society that Guy Debord defined as a Society of the Spectable in which the experience of the reality has been replaced with its representation. "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes, "rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."
Based on his performances Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio unmasks this epistemological level, at which the images experience their ritualization.
The Madonna, the ritualized image of a tautological religious language par excellence equals a noumenon, which works as a representation of something that cannot exist or cannot be experienced. As in the language of mass media and advertising, the images are not called into question, but merely are accepted in a state without opinion and in a common truth. In this, however, the gap between the reality and the representation of reality is not filled.
Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio creates a stage for the Madonna, a mise-en-scene, in which the object plays the role of a picture, or better, the appearance of an image. On this stage she moves by the use of a profane technique from the back office of the gallery towards the depraved Potsdamer Straße. As carefully as the place, the date of the opening is selected: On December 8, Mary's conception is celebrated by the Catholicism.
In the context of the Potsdamer Straße this with bizarre meanings overlaid icon of the Madonna moves as a foreign body and enacts a level of questioning confusion. Like a nihilistic cynic Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio accomplishes it to set traps by creating misunderstandings as an epistemological means.