Between one cycle and another, I take a break for some “serious fun”. Following the “Tortures” (Abu Ghraib), where the painting was a prison full of degraded bodies, merciless guards, bandaged heads, baying dogs and armed shadows, mouths gaping from the nightmare, I produced the “Disguises”. I chose sixty drawings from my collection, and returned to being a “pirate” once more. I manipulated them on canvases of a different scale, trying to kill the ”primitive”. Not to mask or to camouflage, but to disguise: a true pretense. A lie as a co-response. But irony no longer saves me, I can hide myself no longer. Once again it is the time of tragedy, with the cycle of the “De-Positions”.
They could also be deportations, in the sense that I set or transfer the body to an “autre” place. Lay it down in different positions, like a removal; purplish skeletal hands, hung bodies, large black bands simulating crosses. Birds terrified by the scene, if not by the deliberate theatrics like a laic comedy which turns to tragedy, perhaps too overtly stated, too narrated. And still there are hearts flayed, bodies laid down almost like sculptures, eyes wide-open or closed, mouths gaping, contortions on diagonal axes, precarious equilibrium, de-positions gathered up by gigantic hands.
Maybe prayers… maybe shouts and claims for compensation, superstitious dismissals, obliterations, pretenses. There are signs designed FOR and signs designed MORE: perhaps they await the gallows and another de-position to lay down once more, in that the “body” is always “isolated”.
Austerity and desperation are “drawn” without participation, as for a publicity poster, in that the “awareness of pain” and its own expression, if not the same images, have been commissioned by the world and by its media. A voluntary anguish, drawn and “planned”.
We have all been deposed by the massacre of trends, by the idea of art as art, by the “art” of criticism, by rampant homologation, by memory, perhaps by history.
The painter, the “Lamented”.
Concetto Pozzati