STATEMENT
There are three elements in my work that coexist. Philosophy of mind, in the sense of identity, conscience and language; Technology, in the choice of a medium that often allows me to express and reinterpret my imagination in an “innovative” way; and finally Art. I interpret this as the mastery of a sign, of a style, employing a personal and mysterious procedure that is built up and refined over time (occasionally remaining a prisoner of mere virtuosity), and which leads to unpredictable but subjectively powerful formal results. The outcome is something the artist sees as “necessary”: in the artist’s eyes (and in the eyes of those who appreciate the result), the artwork seems to have its own disruptive “need to exist”.
ABOUT THE WORK
It sometimes happens that the visual arts give the impression that they are still capable of progress. It happens at a very particular moment in the history of Europe when the official message launched by public exhibitions would like to indicate that in the last thirty years nothing could rise beyond the point reached by the avant-gardes, a point beyond which a unique pass would open towards a definitively stable promised land. This grave certainty has been earned after three generations of constant ruptures of pre-existing patterns, from the dawn of a genially inverted urinal to the twilight of a shark sadly submerged in formaldehyde. The obsolete art that preceded the century of modernity had evolved in a far more mundane way, by learning and innovation, by assimilation and questioning. For the ancients, for Caravaggio as for Velasquez or Goya, "ars tamquam natura non facit saltus." ...more
It sometimes happens that the visual arts give the impression that they are still capable of progress. It happens at a very particular moment in the history of Europe when the official message launched by public exhibitions would like to indicate that in the last thirty years nothing could rise beyond the point reached by the avant-gardes, a point beyond which a unique pass would open towards a definitively stable promised land. This grave certainty has been earned after three generations of constant ruptures of pre-existing patterns, from the dawn of a genially inverted urinal to the twilight of a shark sadly submerged in formaldehyde. The obsolete art that preceded the century of modernity had evolved in a far more mundane way, by learning and innovation, by assimilation and questioning. For the ancients, for Caravaggio as for Velasquez or Goya, "ars tamquam natura non facit saltus."
For Giuseppe Ragazzini the old-fashioned method applies. In him love the "Femmes cent têtes " of Max Ernst, in him reappear the splits and cuts in the real of Magritte, in him survives the school of film animation of the first Bohemian television, in him transpires the twisted depiction of Francis Bacon and certain times the political expressionism invented in the Latin Americas. But he is not ashamed of this, perhaps not even fully aware of it. He has absorbed the quotations along with the air of the time. He simply uses them and surpasses them by adding to the experiences made by others who have gone before him. He proceeds. And his evolving is perhaps nothing more than the mutation due to the evolution of the times.
It is certainly a blessing to be able to invent collages without using scissors to cut out magazines and books from the nineteenth century; you can do it much sooner with a computer and do it in color. You can move characters and situations far more easily with the mouse. And you can then put the result you get into animation with easy-to-access programs. You just have to think about it. With talent. The difficulty, if anything, is in finding the materials. He does not search for them, he makes them in the most traditional way of Western practice, with painting. Starting from his own paintings, made with skill, and with subtle irony, he assembles a small cosmos of cut-outs and additions. The result obtained is surprising. It is that of the creation of a world at once dreamlike and concrete. Dreamlike seems this world because it is made, just like the mysterious thoughts of sleep, from incongruous shards that find a new relationship with each other, pieces of thought that coexist without deductive connection but with the transmitted feeling of another and much deeper connection.
Ragazzini learned from Picasso's Dora Maar that the nose goes where the flow of the brush wants and where the surreal balance of the final form pushes. But he knows, as much as the brilliant Spaniard did, and perhaps because of him, that reality is not the trivial thing we see at first glance but the far more complex and mental thing we process. That is where the unexpected path of escape from the obvious that haunts the contemporary eye comes from. And what is the poetic gesture if not the escape into the unexpected?