Fontanarossa titles the exhibition, and translates to ‘Red Fountain’, referring to the striking image of the magma that flows from Mount Etna, a volcano on the East Coast of Sicily. The blood-red lava pours from the spout and drips down the mountainside toward Sicily’s quaint towns and cities below, threatening with its force and vibrancy — something both heavenly and horrific. Within that burning red gush is all the virile sexuality and passion, as well as destruction and sin, erupting from the centre of the world, from the heart of everyone.

Acting as a centrifugal force is a sculpture assuming the same title. Three headless horses in a maelstrom are impaled through their middle by a pole that makes reference to the parading of Saintly sculptures in the streets of Italy. Both in compliment and in contrast to the muscled corpora of the Saints, such as Sebastian (a notable ‘gay icon’ amongst Catholics with proclivities), the horses take on an explicitly homoerotic position. Their headlessness, a surrender to carnal impulses and a dismissal of their rationalising function. They conjure images from the Book of Revelations, despite missing one party, they resemble the Four Horses of the Apocalypse, signifying an end to Holy morality, beckoning in the looming threat of evil. However, this is thwarted by their camp display, with tight waists and bulging buttocks, hooves that go limp at the wrist like an all-too-familiar signifier to gay men everywhere. It is absurd and beautiful, and in turn appears influenced by the dramatic, overtly expressive nature of Southern Italians. A Sicilian temperament for excesses of emotion, dramaturgy and rich performance are all noticeably camp, and give reason for why we always ask: “Is he gay, or just European?” — The Europeans in question are almost always Italians.

Works such as the disappearance of a house are doused in urine, raising questions round power and who grasps hold of it. Power is up for grabs between the ultimate ‘house of God’, and the Queer man trapped inside of it, growing ever-bigger from the obfuscation of his own truth. He pisses on it, perhaps out of fear, or as a defiance, yet both with an arousal. He, like Pinocchio, another Italian story perhaps as widely known as the Bible, who wishes to become a real boy, can’t help but stick out, like the nose tearing a hole in the steelwork. The subsequent erosion and rusting of the house structure is neither celebrated as liberation, nor shunned as immoral, but felt, and understood as the consequence of being forced to accept one way of life in the wake of another.

Disconnected and disembodied from the house or fence that once held it in place, is a gate: chi entra esce (who gets in gets out). It is neither an entrance nor an exit, but a question. The spectator is left wondering whether this may be a gate to heaven or hell, and has no help in knowing what fate awaits them on the other side. The gate is a threshold and a passage, one that allows people in and lets them out within the same breath - indicating the sensibility of homosocial relations as they currently stand. The artist’s own conflicting feelings around the significance of tradition and a Catholic morality stands on one side, alongside his resentments toward the transient nature of homosexual relationships. On the other side is the necessary measure of authenticity and sexual freedom that liberates him from an outdated model of social organisation and control. It is unclear which side of the fence he stands on, or is presenting as ‘true’. As such, it is uncertain if this is the front or the back we are looking at. It would seem that the artist doesn’t know either, and that this conflict is the catalyst for the eruption of the fontanarossa, present in thefertile land through which it flows, hot, heavy and hurting.

                                                                                                                                                     Text by Daniel Valentine

photo documentation by Ben Deakin

Photo documentation by Ben Deakin

Indietro
Indietro

ercolina

Avanti
Avanti

in the closet