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Waiting for the perfect day
From 03/09/2010 to 16/10/2010
Artists :
Lionel Scoccimaro
REVIEW :
Sea and Sex and Sun and Sex and Drugs and Rock 'n' roll. Such is the cocktail thatLionel Scoccimaro offers to us: the intoxication of the lines by the mixture of the genres.
Of the synesthete.
It is sometimes good to go back to the roots of art, to recall that shapes and colors form the basis of artistic expression. Lionel Scoccimaro is fully aware of it. His Custom Made roly-poly toys play with the codes of the type of Henry Moore’s modernistic sculpture as much as with the trend of customising cars and add to the visual pleasure, the taste of the touch. It is therefore not surprising that these totemic tributes, free associations, recall the tempestuous noise of surfing legend Matt Archbolb or John Waters's psychotropic films.
Based on the same principle, the new GAP series penetrate into a certain tradition of craft, turned wood sculpture, into a deviant formalism. The sensuality of the wood, the mix of essences, the confrontation with the metal, engage a maelstrom of references, from the pendulum to the spinning top by way of the sex toy. The child has fun, the adult too, and the wise look for revelations. In an oversize object, he describes life and reveals what is hidden, or buried, in each of us.
Collision of the senses and of art history also come to cross swords with his medieval sledgehammer: imagine Alex of A clockwork Orange exchanging his cane for a puzzle of primitive art before leaving fora punitive ballad beside André Cadere armed with his bars of of turned wood.
… In the sin-esthete.
The work of Lionel Scoccimaro swings back and forth between violence and delicacy, freedom from care and premeditation, culture schocks and aesthetic clashes. He draws this self-portrait hiding as an aesthete of sin. The MOPO series immortalize the practice of collage born nearly a century ago in the hands of an Andalusian obsessed by women. Reactivated, the Surealist technique allows to imbricate in the same work themes, guiding lines, curves beloved by the artist. Surfing, skateboard and tattoo, flowers and girls, works of art, form a retrospective of teenage fantasies founded on an abstract rhythmic composition.
For SMYT, sexuality as a form of social rebellion is treated as raw voyeurism. Seized by the immediacy of the Polaroïd, all the history of the sexual liberation inherited from the 1960s is perpetrated by the accumulation of women's pictures showing their breasts in public. Lionel Scoccimaro combines the private and public sphere, binds a personal story to a socio-political dimension and uses the poverty of the material as a performance report.
In these last two works, he seems to question the permanent ambiguity that eats away our western cultures, Puritanism aggravated and enhanced by the hyper mediatization of pornography, where the omnipresent accessibility to sex confronts a taboo that tries to remain hidden.
After all, doesn’t the Sea and Sex and Sun and Sex and Drugs and Rock 'n' roll program seem to constitute ‘the perfect day’ ? We’ll just have to wait for that blessed day.
Benjamin Bianciotto
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