Le Bugie dell’Arte

Art critic Marco Senaldi writes in the preface: The extraordinary metaphor of the bears is literally taken up by them in their Composizione in bianco (2007) and is indelibly impressed on us because, even if obscurely, we realise that it is discussing, not so much bears, as us. At the very geographical and climatic edge of the world, in the most inhospitable place on earth, one of the largest predatory mammals has been caught in a terrible trap from which it can’t be freed even by its animal instincts. Looking at the metallic trap that holds its paws, however, we can make out with both curiosity and horror, the residue that our own society continues to produce: from waste packing materials to industrial refuse, from sad empty bottles to chewed-up bank notes, the ballast holding down life seems to belong to a culture, ours, that has gone into overdrive. And yet what we are observing is not an educational diorama in the Museum of Natural History, but a highly refined reconstruction in pottery that brings to mind Renaissance tropme-l’oeil: a dizzying game of artistic mirrors in the depths of which we glimpse the deformed image of our own history.