Four Rooms is a group show in four stages, in which five young Neapolitan artists – Luca Mattei e Carlotta Sennato, Giulio Delvè, Corrado Folinea, Celesta Bufano – have the opportunity to display their works in a public context and, at the same time, be confronted with the experience of exposing in a museum. The exhibitions is accompanied by four texts, each written by a young Arts student at the University of Naples “l’Orientale”, who has been selected by professor Rossella Bonito Oliva to measure himself with contemporary artistic research and imagination.
Room 3
Corrado Folinea, Robert aping me, 2007, and Blackpainting, 2008
text by Christian Carrozza: Immersed in this sky
The philosophical cue offered by these various elements is the theme that pervades Christian Carrozza’s text “Immersed in this sky”. In it Man is compared to an empty shell, a parasite in this life who finds it hard to regain awareness of himself and his potentials.
Nauseating agglomerates, fragile molluscs wrapped in a dark shell like a night without dawn, a night without tomorrow – what am I talking about? Men, of course.
Each closed in his own shell, wanderers in their own worlds, and yet something mysteriously unites them, they desperately hold on to one another, one above the other, one against the other! This is the Man’s dilemma… he has the nature of all things inside of himself, but he hasn’t got a nature of his own yet… then, he grows up hanging on to what he can.
Fight for survival, is this what it’s all about? If so….there’s no tomorrow! Yet, inside the shell, inside our flesh something roars voicelessly: it is our soul…. the beast craving for love in the bowels of Man.
It is a thing formed in chaos (…) it stands alone and never changes
It pervades everywhere and never becomes exhausted
(Laozi XXV)
Foolish is the Man who buried his heart into the jaws of the beast, he is nothing but an empty shell. He eagerly holds on to a life that is not a life. And in the shadow of himself he cleverly and servilely awaits his prey, and drops his Man’s disguise at night.
Do you think the night of your heart will bring you comfort?
Listen, think, the question is more important than the answer.
Do we really believe that this untruthful flesh that envelops us is the reality? How false! The thing is…we just don’t want to see, we just don’t want to listen to the truth that yearns for our extinction. And so we sleep, trapped in this flesh shell, where we just exist and nothing else, dreaming that one day we will go out and play.
The only certainty we’re left with is the awareness of our powerlessness…. we then avert our gaze and embody the ephemeral. And something inside fatally dies off and never comes to life anymore.
Go back to the real time,
raise your eyes, breathe… you’re alive
what will you make of yourself?
Only you can decide it
Immersed in this sea that they call sky, Man goes through his time looking for himself and never succeeding. He looks for his gift, his talent, but he can’t find it, he can’t see it because he is sitting on it. The false time passes by… and up there, beyond the sea, nothing appears.
We’re convinced that this shell is the terminus… the end product, but there is an off-chance that it is just a medium… it is a deep, silent awareness… if Man doesn’t break the shell before time, he will die without ever being born. For the second time Man will come out of waters. Break the shell of this world before the great Fisherman returns, otherwise… poor never-existed shell … just hope you taste good at least.