Amah Art: July 2009

For Sale By The Artist

Graphite drawing on Stonehenge paper

8 x 10

$250.00 + $20.00 S&H

For some time now, I have been debating whether or not to start a body of work based on the human figure. I have always been interested in how our society views the nude figure and how our acceptance of it has changed over the centuries. The debate between art and obscenity is an old one and artists have been walking that line ever since cave men scratched the first nude figures on the walls of caves. Even with all of our advancements in technology, science and the arts, the nude figure still remains something of a mystery. Most of the nude images in our culture tends to be crude , pornographic style images. Multi media has crossed that "line" from something that is tasteful to out and out vulgarity.

Then I came across a photographer that had created these beautiful pictures of bound women. On the whole the pictures were sensual, tasteful and respectful. I started to wonder why these pictures appealed to me even though the subject matter should have been distasteful. Then I started to think, would i feel the same way towards this image if the rope was not in the picture. What is it about the rope that changes this picture from something normal and acceptable to something on a different level.

I was also drawn to how the rope dissected the body. The rope shatters the body and creates beautiful lines the follow the line of the body but in its own right creates it own pattern as well.

Then I was lucky enough to come across the winners of THE INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL FOR ENGRAVING. Anyone who knows my background knows I am a print maker and as soon as I saw this image I was captivated. The artist's name is Elena Petrocco. In seeing her image I realzied that I am not alone in my facination with the bound human body and what it means in our culture.

PREMIO GIOVANI

Elena Petrocco (Italy)

Mortificazione, 2007

Drypoint, 415 x 280 mm

Elena Petrocco writes: "The work “Mortificazione” is an engraving entirely realized with the direct technique of the Drypoint on a zinc plate. The printing sent to the competition has been made on a German paper called Hahnemueller. The unequalled character of the mark realized through this technique, characterized by the suffused glow of the edges and by the precise line, gave me the possibility of reaching the best result I could get. As the dry point is only intended for few printings – the mark tends to disappear because of the pressure made by the press during the printing – in the following copies I had to intervene in order to rectify the lighter and more delicate tones.

The work belongs to a project called “ The Unveiled Body” I realized while attending the Academy of Fine Arts in L’Aquila and then presented as my degree thesis.

My survey starts from the opinion that the body is today, more than ever, the centre of our contemporary tensions, great economic, philosophical, political, genetic, media, scientific and social considerations are directed towards the body. It’s a paradigm, constantly renewing itself as far as it is engraved and marked on the societies’ memory. It’s a magnetic algorithm drawing our eye and “raiding” our mind.

In our exhibitionist and vulgar culture, the naked body is fashionable – it’s no more a taboo – but an expression of corporeity made banal, endlessly repeated, propagandizing a useless eroticism, without any involvement. The body becomes a ready-made product of the organic sphere, of the world, of the human being coming out to be flesh without mystery. I have been trying to analyze all this through marks and shapes, by interpreting them in a succession of change and contamination cancelling the already weak frontiers of knowledge.

“Mortificazione” intends to be a description of affliction, it’s a container of the “vacuum-sealed” beauty; metaphor of the senses lost in the broken up anatomy merchandised by media as flesh for slaughter. “Mortificazione” represents the awareness of the body deceiving the senses and the truth and it shows its pain in its imprisonment of knots and ropes.

My work is a “manifesto” of protest reminding that the body must be matter of life, being the only evidence of the existence, the only thing giving us the possibility of not disappearing in the ether and not to be robotized and swallowed up by the virtual space.

I was born in Campobasso in 1985; I got a First Level diploma in Fine arts and media studies – Course of Graphics and I’m now attending the last year of the Multimedia Graphics course – Second Level. I approached the world of chalcographic printmaking when I was 16 and the Academy of Fine Arts gave me the possibility of going deeper into my knowledge of this art. I have had several artistic experiences, increased in these last two years with my participation into exhibitions and competitions. The most important exhibitions have been in 2008 the Joint Exhibition “Glances at the town” at the Sixteenth Century Castle in L’Aquila, realizing a twinning with the Graphic Department of the Academy in Valencia; the exhibitions held in the palace of the Region of Abruzzo and in MUSPAC, the experimental Museum of Contemporary Art in L’Aquila, the exhibition at the Museo del Corso (Rome Foundation), in Via del Corso after mention and Diploma of Merit for the competition Fondazione G. Onesti – Italian National Olympic Academy with the work “Italian Disease, The Doping”.