Oneiric, reminiscent of Renaissance paintings, and seemingly embedded with references to the darkest chapters of Italy’s history (such as the killing of Mussolini in Mezzegra, Italy), Luigi Presicce’s new photos and videos in his solo show “In forma di autoscopia” (In the form of autoscopy) are haunting. An ad hoc work created for the occasion, Il grande architetto (The Great Architect), 2011, is presented as a video installation. Inspired by the killing of Hiram Abiff––a key allegorical figure in Masonic ritual and the architect of the temple of Solomon––the four untitled and looped video projections appear at first as freeze-frame images of a single story. In fact they are shots that often frame immobile figures caught in the act of doing something or holding a pose––stock-still, as if frozen by the shutter release.
In the first video, a man on horseback whose face is covered by a pyramid-shaped helmet holds in his hand a mask with the features of the writer and philosopher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. At his side is another man who holds the reins, his torso bare and face covered. The figures stand in front of Lu Cafausu, an eighteenth-century coffeehouse. In the background one can glimpse an anonymous modern building that clashes with the elegance of the figures and with the architecture of the older structure. In the second video, three men with exposed torsos mime the act of striking and destroying the golden head. The scene unfolds on a heap of earth in a bauxite quarry in Otranto, Italy. The men symbolize three followers of Abiff who killed their master with tools of geometry, which are evocative because they are taken directly from a Renaissance-style painting exhibited in the show. The third video transmits an overturned image of a crane; once the framing is turned right side up, the viewer understands that the crane serves to support the body of a man, namely one of the three followers, who are all executed: one crucified, one stoned to death, and one hung from a rope. The fourth video, set in a quarry in Lecce, Italy, represents expiation. Two men are filmed while inside an old tufa quarry from the early twentieth century; one holds a book and a three-dimensional model of the rules for constructing cathedrals. Thus concludes the allegorical tale that Presicce reveals with conscious visual and evocative skill.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
