Curated by Viana Conti

February 28 - April 24, 2015

Venice, the personal exhibition, curated by Viana Conti, of the Italian artist Mauro Ghiglione, entitled Complesse Sparizioni, is a title that Paul Virilio, theorist of the aesthetics of disappearance, would like as much as Edgar Morin, theorist of the intelligence of complexity.

Entering the context in which Complex Disappearances occur, immediately confronts the viewer with a skull suspended in front of the loop projection of the film The Invention of Morel, by Emidio Greco: on the wall, in which the shadow of the skull returns painted in blue, the fatal encounters of the castaway run by, prey to the fever of desire, exhausted by the climbing of the rocks of the inhospitable island of Caponero, more and more crumpled in the white suit and frustrated by the indifference of the seductive, icy, Faustina. The appearance of the most disturbing allegory of the Vanitas in the installation, entitled Alteramente sani, anagram of Eternal Week, immediately refers to a story where love and death coincide, starting from their status as an image. Surprisingly resembling the castaway, filmically interpreted by the actor Giulio Brogi, Mauro Ghiglione seems to propose a self-portrait of which he is both the author and the spectator. As the castaway, victim of an elusive and unrequited love, decides to sabotage Morel's mortal device, but only after sharing the fate of Faustina, so Mauro Ghiglione, reproducing a phantasmatic of contacts, decides to sabotage the work by delivering it to the corrosion of the salt, tearing its photographic image, throwing its aesthetic-testimonial potential against the sound barrier, to enter another dimension, an archeology of feeling, to escape the compulsion to repeat a life lived as a show , lethargically sunk in the armchair of a space cinema, or duplicated in the cyber hero of a video game.

"1298 years of Europe - (the philosopher's shirt)" is the title of the work that intends to visually restore the identity of Western thought, by lining up on the wall twenty panels of pink Himalayan salt, with a metal support, on which the faces of as many philosophers have been digitally printed, whose age, added up, totals precisely the one thousand two hundred and ninety-eight years of the title. The reason why the artist uses a sodium chloride support, fatally destined to corrode, over time, the reproduced image, overturning the metaphor of the salt of life into the salt of death, would have the testimonial function of highlighting, through the progressive disappearance of the image, the persistence of the gesture that determined it.

The selection of the names of the philosophers is not aimed at comparing and analyzing their thoughts, but at evocatively draining their faces like hanging clothes. Under each portrait tile, twenty white shirts run horizontally, referring to the artist's or the doctor's work smock: candid symbolic references to a condition that is as thaumaturgical as it is deadly. By this, the artist means that the death of all the selected philosophers, except one, has not eliminated the effect of the action in life. In fact, beyond their real existence, a reality of thought persists that does not nullify their coming into the world. The work 1298 years of Europe, in fact, overshadows, under the track, the question, of Edgar Morin himself, living, on the sustainability of a socio-economic system oriented towards an indiscriminate as well as unlimited growth, towards debates on the right to peace , on the function of the United Nations, on the questions of the so-called Just War, in view of a reorganization of the relations of property and production in the context of a Western society with an advanced capitalist regime.
In front of the entrance to the room on the first floor stands the work Image: a key to reading the exhibition and the artist's thought, who, in the laser perforations of a mournful black screen in forex, realizes a fatal and radical execution of the image, whose disappearance occurs as a collapse in the immaterial verbality of a blue, cemetery light. At a certain distance from the wall, on six projecting iron panels, covered with a symbolically absolute blue, the images of as many planes pass, sliding over the edge of the frame, taken in the act, virtually followed by the roar, of breaking the transonic barrier , to break, in other words, the wall of sound, with a strong metaphorical reference to the entry into another dimension. After the tearing of the photographs, it is still the strong gesture of rupture that becomes a work, which asks to be protected and preserved, it is still photography that, by exorcising it, interrupts its continuity with the world, breaks the relationship with reality. What information comes from this visual provocation? The result is the parietal installation, set up frontally, of the nine modules, of scalar size, hanging as a flag that show, in sequence, the carving of the letters that form the neologism Ininforma, contraction of the irrelevant terms and information: again blue the projections, painted on the wall, of their shadows. The question is, unequivocally, addressed to the viewer.