At the end of the 1990s, a younger generation
of artists gained recognition on the contemporary Italian scene,
which in their orientation towards media such as video, film,
photography and computer technologies, developed a number of
new thematic and linguistic approaches. Unlike previous decades,
when Italian art was profiled through specific group phenomena
(such as Arte Povera, Transavangarda, etc.), the past ten years
have seen the development and dynamics of an extremely indented
scene, at which a large number of individual approaches coexisted,
oriented towards narratives of intimate character, socially
or politically engaged topics, or towards more universal problems
about the relation between art and the world in the process
of global economic and technological transformation.
Artists like Botto & Bruno and Monica Carocci are characterized
by complex inter-media approaches, combining techniques from
film, photography and video. Adrian Tranquilli & Chiara
Clemente, Andrea Malizia, Sarah Ciracì or Grazia Toderi,
using relatively simple technological procedures, create extremely
poetic works, coloured by enigmatic, oniric or noir tones.
On the other hand, Domenico Mangano and Armin Linke developed
a documentary approach in their exploration of political and
social aspects of contemporary reality, while Marcello Maloberti
and Stefania Galegati attempted to bring to light its paradoxical
and ironic sides. Deborah Ligorio, Matteo Basilè, Raffaella
Nappo, Simone Berti and Paolo Canevari are working in the context
of interdisciplinarity and losing strict distinctions between
drawing, animation, painting, video and computer graphics,
while artists like Sissi and Sabina Sabato are exploring intersections
between video and performance. Anna Paola Passerini is realizing
video works in which she keeps to the form of music videos.
In some of them we can recognize film aspects, in others
a tendency to use video in an almost diaristic fashion or in
a completely abstract way, but what they all have in common
is a strong poetic and aesthetic sensibility, which makes these
video works seem like short voyages through different oniric
and dislocated landscapes.
|
