Manuela Carrano,
Il Camaleonte

In its next exhibition, the ArteF gallery will be looking at the current Italian “offshoots” who have spread across the world from the DaDa “plant” of Zurich since 5 February 1916.

The two-dimensional boundaries are broken and the “reality” of photography transported to an emotional level by the added materiality. Photography as a medium is the starting point for surreal estrangement and superelevation by means of the most diverse materials such as nails, cardboard, paint and light. Emotion, thought and dream complete the outer skin in increments, the realistic projection surface of the photography that is perceived as the image of the reality. Art and craft complement the photographic lens, displaying the individual possibilities for interpretation in a three-dimensional room setting that does not contain the medium of photography itself. The iconography of a photographed reality no longer matches the validity of the object we depict or of a known person, but itself becomes the cryptological sign and internalised cipher of the artist’s imagination.

Occhiomagico
La Santa,
Light Box

Manuela Carrano

The works of Manuela Carrano between dream and brute material reveal a sensuality – a puzzle of physical pleasure and technology, of irrationality and gentle calm. Manuela Carrano’s elaborate works are wholly in the tradition of the tactile surrealism of a Meret Oppenheim. She photographs people from her personal environment, prints the pictures on fabric, then paints and nails them in painstaking detail by hand. The results are unique works of art in ‘feminine’ materials (fabric, naked female bodies) and ‘masculine’ metal nails that appear to float in the greenhouse of experience and memories. These dream landscapes of the inner life are mounted on wood and surrounded in velvet, and, like the works of Louise Bourgeois, create an iridescent tension between violability and melancholy that breaks the rules of photography and makes the pain of living tangible. A gentle unicorn with a collar of nails is a unique interpretation of the transgression between photography, painting and three-dimensionality.

Occhiomagico

The “jack-of-all-trades” Giancarlo Maiocchi cannot be defined by one single genre. Occhiomagico is a platform on which music, photography, education in art, advertising and design flow together in order to create inter-disciplinary works of art from them. Enriched by the volatility of music or the omnipresent design, his photographs oscillate between installation and happening, art object and flux.

Maiocchi completed the installation series (Light Boxes) Mi Vida on display at the ArteF whilst he was in charge of music, dance and theatre at the Biennale in Venice. In his work, he commemorates the atmosphere between dream, analysis and profundity of the Surrealists Man Ray and Salvador Dalí, and Bunuel’s chien andalou. Like Manuela Carrano, to Maiocchi the body in its fragility and violability is the mirror on which the battle of our life takes place. But by using out-of-the-ordinary additions or references to design quotes, the artist mixes symbolism, Surrealism, metaphysical and psychedelic experiences in a floating and yet compressed statement that creates the same feelings as a David Lynch film.