Curated by Viana Conti.

After the success of the exhibition Movements and situations by MUNTADAS and Mariateresa SARTORI, on Saturday 12 December at 6.30 pm, the Michela Rizzo Gallery inaugurates Paso doble, an exhibition that intends to make the work of two artists of two generations interact: FRANCO VACCARI, one of the most significant exponents of the conceptual art scene, where he identified his own terrain of conceptual realism and MAURO GHIGLIONE, a post-Duchampian of Conceptual and Minimal ancestry, one of the most representative of a middle generation, creator of his own archeology of the future. The Paso Doble exhibition, curated by Viana Conti, subscribes to a paradigm shift, activating through the works of Franco Vaccari and Mauro Ghiglione, respectively, a reflection on the State of the Contemporary Art System and on the Posthuman Condition of Feeling. Franco Vacca Duchamp, at the beginning of the twentieth century, sitting at the chess table, plays those moves starting from which the notions of artist, work, value, have no longer been the same in history and in the art market; Franco Vaccari, creator of the aesthetic formula of Exposition in real time since 1969, confirms himself today as the undisputed forerunner of the fatal correspondence between the world of art, which has become the storage of safe-haven assets, and that of out-of-control finance, which sees the market as the only guarantor. of value. Having demonstrated the conceptual analogy between the production of a creative value of a sign character, in Duchamp’s work, and the so-called Finance of today, Franco Vaccari presents us with the sensitive analogy with his sequence of diptychs, proceeding to uncover the sources from which the Duchampian celibate Machines derive, removing the veil from their cryptic dimension, revealing the intentional banality of the sources, identified by Vaccari in that ponderous commodity catalog of the early twentieth century that bears the title Manufacture française d’Armes et Cycles and in the books of Bibliothèque bleu. Franco Vaccari not only arrives at the exhibition of the proofs, but takes them on his own, subscribing them as photographic works in the dual form of the diptych in which right on the bare and raw print of the page from which Duchamp drew that ready-made, located on the left, which it would have led to the stars in both fame and market value. In the corpus of the pairs of images there are only three exceptions: the Dulcinea diptych, the diptych, Allevamenti di dust – Check for telepathy, and the diptych Etant donnés – from a swingers magazine, which attest, on different levels, connoting itself as a scoop , the personal dynamics of his cognitive tools and the strength of his theoretical investigation on the aesthetic field.

Mauro Ghiglione Men, one day, will disappear, but their reduced images will remain, which will remember them. And they will cry without knowing why. Mauro Ghiglione’s exhibition scenario is based on an aesthetic of disappearance. In the mournful sign of white, which is also the color of the Bride, the artist announces the silent, perhaps irreversible, fall of the sensations activated by desire. Foreshadowing a world in which humans will have given way to melancholy processions of residual images, crossed by nostalgia and regret for values ​​confined to oblivion, he encloses, in a series of candid ampoules, the expressions of human feeling. His mega-photographs represent hands that emerge from the void to retrieve, by touching them tactfully, the footprints of one’s being, dissolved in the phantasmagoria of the simulacrum. As in a story by Philip K. Dick, populated by seductive replicants, the appearance of those, bloodless, female hands, is accompanied by the sequence of white containers, on which the inscriptions Love, Disgust, Joy, Anger, Pain, stand out. Fear, Guilt, Surprise. After having become depositories of a human desire by now extinguished, the images circulated by the media universe would not cease to attract, in their two-dimensionality, the volume of reality, which in its journey through time and space would enter the fourth dimension of the imaginary. . Starting from the melancholy and apocalyptic initial quotation of Jean Clair, in Ghiglione’s work there is a continuous current that from the sophism of the Bride, in Duchamp’s Great Glass, through the hypotheses elaborated by Pawlowski in the Journey into the country of the fourth dimension, arrives, as in a game of Chinese boxes, in the book Il grande illusionista. The exhibition continues with the alignment of seven conical structures on whose tip as many skulls, invariably white, on which a syringe is stuck, parade.

Franco Vaccari was born in Modena in 1936; he completed scientific studies with a degree in Physics. He made his artistic debut as a visual poet. Particularly significant in its subsequent evolution are the title of one of his books from 1966 – The Traces – and the use that the artist makes of photography in it to present graffiti as anonymous poetry, found poetry. The theme of the track and the photographic medium are two constants that run through all his work. From the beginning Vaccari does not use photography to produce mimetic, analogical images, but as the imprint of a presence, as a signal, as a physical trace, precisely, of a being: an imprint that derives its meaning from the existential relationship, often opaque, which unites it to what caused it. In this regard, his participation in the 1972 Biennale with the real-time exhibition no. 4, Leave a photographic trace of your passage. The location of his artistic work is tangent to different areas, but the one that perhaps best expresses its meaning is Conceptual Realism. He is credited with the authorship of the concept of “real-time exposure” which he explored both from a theoretical and operational point of view. Vaccari has always accompanied his artistic activity with theoretical reflection by publishing, among other things, Duchamp and the concealment of work – 1978 (re-edited in full in this publication), and Photography and the technological unconscious – 1979; the latter considered “the most important Italian contribution to the current debate on photography” (A. Colombo, “Panorama”, 24 October 1983). In 1984 he held an anthological exhibition at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna. In addition to 1972, he participated in the Venice Biennale in 1980 and again in 1993 with personal rooms. He is currently professor of Visual Arts at the Politecnico di Milano.

Franco Vaccari was born in Modena in 1936; he completed scientific studies with a degree in Physics. He made his artistic debut as a visual poet. Particularly significant in its subsequent evolution are the title of one of his books from 1966 – The Traces – and the use that the artist makes of photography in it to present graffiti as anonymous poetry, found poetry. The theme of the track and the photographic medium are two constants that run through all his work. From the beginning Vaccari does not use photography to produce mimetic, analogical images, but as the imprint of a presence, as a signal, as a physical trace, precisely, of a being: an imprint that derives its meaning from the existential relationship, often opaque, which unites it to what caused it. In this regard, his participation in the 1972 Biennale with the real-time exhibition no. 4, Leave a photographic trace of your passage. The location of his artistic work is tangent to different areas, but the one that perhaps best expresses its meaning is Conceptual Realism. He is credited with the authorship of the concept of “real-time exposure” which he explored both from a theoretical and operational point of view. Vaccari has always accompanied his artistic activity with theoretical reflection by publishing, among other things, Duchamp and the concealment of work – 1978 (re-edited in full in this publication), and Photography and the technological unconscious – 1979; the latter considered “the most important Italian contribution to the current debate on photography” (A. Colombo, “Panorama”, 24 October 1983). In 1984 he held an anthological exhibition at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna. In addition to 1972, he participated in the Venice Biennale in 1980 and again in 1993 with personal rooms. He is currently professor of Visual Arts at the Politecnico di Milano.

Mauro Ghiglione was born in Genoa in 1959. Artist of conceptual ancestry, he sets his research, from 1985 to 1993, on the persistence of the expressive potential of matter and symbol in relation to the impermanence of the artistic model (Galleria Zenith – Turin 1990, Studio Alaya – Genoa 1993, A’PERT Gallery – Amsterdam 1989). Her aesthetic choices are oriented in the direction of Minimal Art. Attracted by the interactions between space and memory, her research evolves in a mental direction, comparing, on the level of language, the matter and dynamics of the archetype and deepening the study of the mechanisms of thought and perception (A’PERT Gallery – Amsterdam Double invisible-1994, Leonardi V / Idea gallery – Genoa Suspensions between memory and oblivion-1997, Silvy Bassanese Gallery – Biella Trasfigura-1998, Martano Gallery – Turin Sum over histories – 1999) Since 2000, the cognitive and emotional devices underlying the formalization of his work find their chosen ground in the photographic medium, allowing the artist a more direct confrontation with the problems of contemporary aesthetics.

His work, whose basic reference is history, revisited from memory, is exhibited in terms of installation, video, photographic processing. While on the one hand the language of photography responds punctually to the expressive and theoretical requests of the author, on the other, the artist himself does not cease to question the specific, paradoxically adopting digital technology to produce low-quality images. definition. This particular connotation can be seen in the exhibitions held at the Silvy Bassanese Gallery in Biella (Shhmt – Passencore, 2000 – My hands, my mind, 2005), at the CACT in Bellinzona (Sottili Rivelazioni, 2000) at the Foyer of the Teatro della Corte in Genoa (My Heart, my shoes, video installation 2001), in Turin “Manifest To” artist’s manifesto by the GAM, in Milan PAC – Contemporary Art Pavilion – (Daily Utopias 2002), in Milan, Galleria Maria Cilena (Game open and surroundings, 2003 ), in Modena, S. Salvatore Gallery (Game over, 2003), in Venice, at the Michela Rizzo Gallery (Fresh and Clean, 2005), in Gavi Ligure (Polemos, 2006, curated by Angela Madesani), in Genoa Unimediamodern ( Double game, 2005 – It’s a fugue among us 2008), in Venice, at the Michela Rizzo Contemporary Art Gallery, double exhibition, (Paso Doble, 2009) Mauro Ghiglione / Franco Vaccari, curated by Viana Conti. On the concept of the non-locality of information, for which the fragment of a hologram would seem to contain the entire image, or the area of ​​a human brain the integral memory of the external world, his archeologies of the future would represent places in the process of disappearance, preluding at unknown dimensional thresholds.

* Jean Clair, from the essay The Last Machine, published in the volume edited by Harald Szeemann The celibate machines, Electa editions, 1989. Milan.

** Gilles Deleuze, Difference and repetition, translation by Giuseppe Guglielmi, Raffaello Cortina, 1997.