RECONDITO

Filippo Berta - Chiara Calore
Bi-personal curated by Carlo Sala
Auditorium Parco della Musica, Rome

Exhibition included in the event ConsulenTia 2023

March 14 to 16, 2023

The bi-personal exhibition Recondito aims at investigating the hidden and primal aspects that connote the person through the works of authors Filippo Berta (Treviglio, 1977) and Chiara Calore (Abano Terme, 1994). The photographs and videos documenting Berta's performances express the contradictory condition of contemporary man, suspended between the social 'ties' that lead to homologation and the desire to claim his individuality and free will. Chiara Calore, on the other hand, creates canvases of great gestural and coloristic impact where the human figure is hybridized with animal forms, thus subverting the usual perception of things to generate visual universes in perpetual mutation that question every certainty of reality. 

Berta's photographic image Just one (2017) documents the performance that saw a sheep placed on a pedestal - reminiscent of the imposing poses of classical equestrian statuary from the Roman world and Renaissance culture - whose soft fur is sheared. For the artist, the action is a clear allegory of a collectivity embodied in the animal's snow-white coat, which, while having traits of extreme purity, is inexorably unifying. The performance Sulla retta via (2014) shows a collective action where people try to walk following the waves of the sea, thus representing man's impossibility to find a balance between two dichotomous aspects: on the one hand instinct and on the other the regulation defined by society and its value norms. A similar tension between opposite poles is also present in Allumettes (2013) where a square, composed of the bodies of a series of people engaged in the act of lighting a match, is seen gradually dissolving, showing the fragility of this geometric perfection at times ostentatious.

The recent video One by One (2021) saw the author working in the borders between various states dominated by conflicts, geopolitical and humanitarian tensions such as those between as Mexico and the United States or North and South Korea. The locals were involved to perform an action that is as minimal as it is poetic: the counting in their own language of the thorns of the wires placed on the walls, thus generating what the artist defined as a secular prayer before these barriers that divide bodies but also extend inside our consciences. Finally, the video Homo homini lupus (2011), where Filippo Berta gives body to the bestial aspects that are inherent to the human through a strongly symbolic action that sees two wolves clashing to obtain a flag. This 'visual picture' creates, as noted by Eugenio Viola, a «mise en scène that vindicates the reasons of the state of nature over the state of law» thus overturning our forma mentis of men adhering to a social contract.