Repetita cura: for a tender dialectical construction of human maturity

Repetita cura: for a tender dialectical construction of human maturity (Vicenza, 2022 ).

The realisation that "there is no longer anything small, silly, ugly, wicked, but everything is holy and venerable" is the moment that gives rise to the urgency of a special mutual thoughtfulness in Riccardo Rizzetto and Matete Martini. United in twisting, in the continuous attempt to resolve disparate antinomies, in an incessant fluctuation between opposite poles, only in the imperishable exercise of artistic practice they find that cathartic force necessary to make a no longer debilitating reinterpretation of their experience. And the irony, the same that Hermann Hesse shows off in an unprecedented way in "La Cura", allows to subvert the perception of trauma: a clever game is started between the serious and the facetious, which becomes an effective weapon to play down the ridicule of everyday life, the signs of time, the wear and tear of body and spirit: the absurdity of life is exorcised, exploiting the unexpected opportunity as a springboard for emancipation.

Riccardo Rizzetto implements an inductive reflection starting from the materials of the era dominated by speed. He undergoes the mirage of the “Wasteocene”, from the waste elements to the packaging, synecdoche of the globalized world in which he lives. X represents the first stage in a process of reflection on what is considered as given up. The same resemantization of the obsolete goes further in Crashes: they are pieces of further possible worlds that find a new configuration; canyons, fossils, gems or relics of a post-anthropocene reality in which everything is transformed to return to a new guise. The focus is on permanence, on the speed of transformation, on the urgency of progress and on the risks it entails, in an attempt to stimulate a re-reading of adversity to rewrite the topography of a different opportunity.

“Pain drives the spirit to build. It is a salvific and present action, with which one can be reborn every day. Where the hands fold the paper and seek form, the mind distracts the thought and chases purity also through the use of colour which, in Rizzetto's work, brings the materials back to a new beginning. The mediums stop, marbleize, the forms generated by a ritual and reiterative process of care, re-reading and research in the dark; which proceeds without a prior setting of limit. In working you forget and in the beauty that the eye seeks you find resolution. But what is there to cure essentially? The cure is the decision not to forget, the coexistence of our being and our body, the seductive acceptance of controlling, without inhibiting the possibility of the fragility to manifest itself and the transience of constantly renewing the excitement for the days to come. "(Matete Martini talks about Riccardo Rizzetto)

In this path that simultaneously interrogates all the dimensions of being, the artworks belonging to the Scars series, like snapshots, think about the moments that mark a before and an after; those moments when, like a “tear in the paper sky”, in such a short time so much changes. The conception of trauma evolves and becomes an opportunity to explore alternating dimensions in which to look for new heating lights.

Matete Martini in the Fix series, on the other hand, in the warmth of glass captures an energy that cancels thoughts and shapes a protective envelope. It puts under seal, crystallised with the cooling of the matter itself, fragments of decisive moments, which have marked a point of no return. It is an attempt to isolate memories to protect them and to be able to look at them from the outside to fully learn the lesson. The penetrative act that the nail performs on these sensual bodies also fills the void, reassures the chasm that has been created and which would otherwise remain unjustified. It is a memento of a lacerating experience, but it is also the remedy and the medium through which not to forget.

In the Uncertainty canvases, Matete reflects on the long shadow of those memories, the decomposition of a childhood memory that she no longer knows how to represent clearly. It is an attempt to remember the image by forgetting the pain, thinking only of the repetition of the imprinted form that becomes more and more synthetic until it disappears. She contrasts this background with the fetish for the very event to which she got used to and without which, now, she would not know how to identify herself. Metaphorized in the nail, these traumatic experiences become fixed certainties of an enclosure within which she has learned to move and which she has tamed to the point of perceiving it as a comfort zone. It is a scar to be proud of and which is celebrated by the imperfect volumes of Gestures.

Bodies made up and massaged, covered and dressed to the maximum of their sensuality in enhancing the beauty of their irregularities, Gestures are aggregated, still warm masses, resting buttocks that tend to tear a dress that is now tight to them. That feeling, still warm and intimate, acts as a connection, as an umbilical cord that makes of Gestures and body and mind of Matete elements of a common scheme; all subjected to the same process of healing, growth, enhancement and aesthetic research.

The point of arrival to which Rizzetto and Matete reach and from which they leave again is no longer the same from where they started: at the crossroads, a process of maturation has started and has questioned how to accept does not mean to give up. It is a surrender to the desire for life, to try to love again, in the name of beauty and art, the most sublime forms of the whole of humanity, using love to defeat the mediocrity of clashes, the execrable uselessness of daily trifles. “Because life is not a bill, a mathematical figure, but a prodigy”. And like any spell, each time it can transform us into something new, if we let ourselves be bewitched.

September 8-11 2022, Chiostro di San Lorenzo, Vicenza

Selected links:

Riccardo Rizzetto Studio

Riccardo
Rizzetto
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