Giorgio Bevignani / STICK OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB
by Isabella Falbo
Giorgio Bevignani’s poetics has always been based on an inedited revision of scientific and philosophical concepts filtered through history and the contemporary. His art investigates our “here and now”, swift and mutable, treating it as a temporal-spacial event enclosed in “all existence”. The swift mutability, the unstable conditions, the progressive loss of reference, become suspended structures. They are semantic fragments wholly preserved in deflagrated bodies, sculptural collages formed from the rythmic alternation of modular and minimal elements composed according to a transparent logic made of solids and voids. Here, the spectator, as in a form of dance in a disenchanted era, is invited to intereact with the call for clarification.
In line with the new expositive typology [1], performative and celebrative, from which the artistic message comes through the creation of a “semiological landscape” realized by the union of various disciplines, Giorgio Bevignani’s STICK OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB [2] distinguishes itself as an “integrated installation”, unifying sculpture and video art.
In STICK OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB, the inedited sculptural video installation in Bologna, Via San Felice 3, 155 suspended modular elements emerge from darkness, arranged on a diagonal inclination and reiterated to infinity through the play of mirrors. A video, projecting images in a loop on the installation, represents a sort of contemporary “world soul”, deflagrating on each element. This is accompanied by a soundtrack created by the musicologist Piero Santi.
The effect is excessive, kaleidoscopic and disorientating.
(Lasciato 1 spazio in alto)Through this technique of the three dimensional fragmentation of images, repetitively reduced and expanding in space, Giorgio Bevignani brings the vision onto a new perceptual plain. The aesthetic experience involves the psyche of the viewer who, through the play of projection, finds himself “dressed” in another self and open to a new experience from that of the everyday worldly input. Fragmentation, a dominating contemporary issue, is the “leitmotiv” of STICK OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB.
The reiterated fragmentation of the sculptural installation and of the projected images, metaphorically represents the fragmentation of the contemporary world and of individual identity. Impoverished by a lack of values, our present sense of identity, fleeting and elusive, seems to be composed of many readily modifiable elements like the pieces of a “rubik’s cube”.
If our society is slipping out of control and our contemporary lives appear as illusionist tricks, in STICK OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB the ‘I’ of the spectator leaves the scene and, enveloped in the shades of other possible selves, lives, and identities, it exorcises its own mental projection of itself through its deflagration.
As the true nature of the installation is its global perception through the assemblage of many elements, Bevignani’s deflagration remains a positive activity, apt at subsequently reforming a unity which has feeling, life, individual, exciting and exceptionally beautiful.
[1] For example Pierre Huyghe’s Celebration Park or the events of United Visual Artists
[2] Stick out like a sore thumb: an anglosaxon idiom which means “being easily recognizable as different’, here interpreted as the exception in which diversity refers to something individual, exciting and exceptionally beautiful.
