Twenty-five years, a journey of passion and study between contemporary art, aesthetics, cinema and philosophy, with reading and writing as a dimension of theoretical investigation, already in the classrooms of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. The direction soon became clear for Giulia Giambrone, who in 2017 graduated with a degree in Art Education and Communication, with a thesis on Aesthetics developed together with Professor Massimo Carboni. Among her loves, she writes, are “Dostoevsky, Ingmar Bergman and the piano”. And there is certainly also Luigi Ontani, one of the leading contemporary Italian artists, to whom that thesis was dedicated. This meticulous work has now become a book, published by Alpes Italia: “Luigi Ontani in teoria. Filosofia, estetica, psicoanalisi nell’opera e nell’artista” (2019) will be presented in the Great Hall on Thursday 9 May at 5:30 pm, in the presence of the author, the artist and lecturers Massimo Carboni and Nicoletta Agostini.
In the 100 pages put together by Giambrone – as dense with precise philosophical references as they are enjoyable in their clear analytical structure and the authentic momentum of the prose – Ontani’s visionary adventure is explored in all its facets, through an exercise in critical-philosophical reflection that helps to decode its signs, figures, codes, metaphors, rituals, and lines of time and space. The identity story, between the poetics of the mask and the architecture of the tableaux vivants, in the mix of performance, sculpture, theatre and photography, thus reveals all its meaning and richness. And writing, in the work of the very young author, is a method of profound interpretation, a journey in the name of the gaze, of thought, of the word: from the practice of art, conducted by a great master over a fifty-year career, to the theoretical opening that derives from it, where the image becomes an illuminating place of revelation, genesis, metamorphosis and incarnation.
The essay addresses the theme of the spatial dimension in Ontani’s research, as the measure and excess of an Elsewhere pursued physically and conceptually, that of the infinite stratification of the ego and the obsession with disguise, that of the aesthetic and existential relationship between the ego and the Other, and finally that of ornamentation, with its (obsolete) decorative function recovered in relation to a Mythology of the Subject that cannot be separated from a structural complicity with the Object. Ontani’s body is thus revealed as the stage for a multiple, restless, plural, participatory narrative, offered to the community through ritual, plunged into the eros of image and form, defined in the narcissistic cult and its opposite, in belonging to oneself and in distance, in the proliferation of symbols and in their ever-new staging.
“In the era of the tyranny of the image,” explains Giambrone, there is a renewed need to bring the theoretical element back to light, especially with regard to the work of art. It proves the reversibility between image and theory: complex thought dissolves in the immanent simplicity of the image, which is therefore, par excellence, the place where theory dwells.”. A lucid perspective, which is a precise declaration of intent and also the symptom of a historical urgency, perhaps found with renewed vigour in the younger generations: what to do with the avalanche of images that overwhelms everyday life in the era of the simulacrum, the retreat of reality and virtual communication? What depth and density should be reassigned to the image itself, in the face of its progressive emptying and the radical mutation experienced by the devices of vision? The need to build a new destiny for the collective gaze and for its physical or immaterial referent is a fact that must be responsibly questioned in a transversal sense. A philosophical matter, first and foremost. Which, in the encounter with the practice of art, achieves an evidence, an energy and a specificity of extraordinary effectiveness.
– Helga Marsala