"The expiatory power of violence is not visible to men"
Walter Benjamin, Towards the Critique of Violence, 1921
Loredana Longo’s work has been based, for almost two decades, on the aesthetic of violence. Her representation of it is never lateral, nor pedagogical, but rather through a visual language which she uses with great liberty. Performance, video, installations, carpets, tapestry, sculptures, all coexist to reflect on ruin, remains, on that which violence leaves in all of our lives. The representation is always opulent (from the interiors of rich, Bourgeois salons to the destruction of precious, Persian carpets) without ever being too extravagant.
The crevices of this project, which provide a place for richness, cleanliness, and ruin to coexist, add Crowbar to the collection. The bricks, covered in gold, live with the brutality of industrialized ceramic. Loredana Longo’s fascination with ceramics is not because of it’s archaic and muddy qualities, but because of an authentic understanding of it’s structural potential. The works in this show make evident how the artist chose to work with the possibilities ceramic presents and, more specifically, on the ability to establish the eternal fragility of the material. Both in the case of the golden bricks, and in the army of hands that stare at the viewer from the wall, the intervention occurs when the material is still raw and full of water: the violence transforms the significance (both in the crests of the bricks and in the frayed hands) and is eternally fixed via the firing of the clay. A violence that becomes even more Freudian and perturbing as it is associated with familiar and everyday materials.
Gallery Francesco Pantaleone Arte Contemporanea gives thanks to Stylnove Ceramiche, Laboratorio Claudia Ottaviani Gioielli, JF Wine&Food Communication, Fornace Casetta

Opening: Wednesday, 22 November 2017 at 6 pm

mpefm ITALY art press release