LABS Contemporary art is pleased to present, on Saturday 11 September, L’acqua le bagna come il vento le calpesta (Water wets them like the wind tramples them), a personal exhibition by the artist Dario Picariello. Three greats unpublished installations of the Cicli series will be presented. Cicli is a production started in 2020 that takes its cue from traditions of southern folk songs. The exhibition itinerary is accompanied by a critical text by Eugenio Viola, Chief Curator of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá - MAMBO, Colombia.

 

The installation interventions, made with different materials and techniques, are put on display thanks the use of photographic backstage equipment, such as umbrellas or stands.

The installation interventions, made with different materials and techniques, are put on display thanks the use of photographic backstage equipment, such as umbrellas or stands. The focus is on the photographic medium, a bridge between the past and the present: photographic images come digitally edited, acid-transferred onto textiles or printed on blueback paper made a strips, to be then used to embroider words, according to decorative patterns of clothes ceremonial or natural images.

 

The songs selected for this occasion have different origins and periods; to intertwine the theme commonality of violence, be it physical, verbal or psychological. Each work tells a difficult issue, presented through short verses intertwined on fabrics.

 

The first work, Cinquantaquattro, takes up a traditional oral song in the Alto Jonio Cosentino to show the ha working conditions of laborers in the fields. The worker, willing to undergo hard work, in order not to lose his job, the only source of sustenance for his family, creates a relationship of "dependence" with the landowner.

Phenomenon still today verifiable and of which the subordinate classes are often the protagonists, forced to accept all sorts of abuse in order not to lose their job or incur public humiliation. The work entitled Le Buone Misure (The good measures) takes up the verses of A Partannisa, song of girls in the harvesting of the olives, an ancient Sicilian folk song. A call from a girl who prays her mother not to send it to the mill so as not to submit to the miller's abuses.

Finally, the third installation displays a love affair that has never been consummated nor come to an end. The verses of Strambellate, a song sung in the first person, echo in the air.

 

“He won't send me kisses in the mail anymore

that lose their flavor on the street

if you give them to me give them in my mouth

so you will feel what love is [...] "

 

The exhibition ends with the exhibition of two photographs exhibited as a sort of polyptych. The images presented are the result of a digital process: the photograph is read by a software not suitable for encoding the original digital format, producing an error, or glitch. The image obtained is printed in contact on paper, giving us back appearances that are placed in an indefinite and vibrant spatiality.