Exhibitions. Simone Racheli
Simone Racheli
Galleria Enrico Astuni, Pietrasanta
from: 27 july 2007 to: 25 august 2007
A work of art is always an opportunity to engage in critical reflections. Simone Racheli's latest works, created out of the plastic hybridisation of everyday objects and impossible anatomies, provokes conflicting reactions and thoughts which range from an immediate sense of disgust to appreciation of unparalleled technical mastery. The truth they contain, however, runs the risk of being concealed by their appearance, which is at once appealing and repugnant. Racheli's sculptures, made of papier mache and wax, are hyper-realistic - helping the artist make the object as detailed and directly identifiable as possible. It is no accident that his objects are "skinned" - you can see the living flesh - giving a sense fo incredible nudity. Wax is the most appropriate material to make it all in the most lifelike way. Highlighting, caricaturing, underscoring aspects of reality - however minimal, detailed and parcelled out they may be - has now become an anesthetic and political operation. We are witnessing a reality that is essentially pervaded by its own mirror image, as Guy Debord says in Society of the Spectacle, so our perception of the world is really a perception reflected by the instruments that comunicate it to us: television, the press, newspapers, photos and images. We've got an excess of spectacular or spectaularised reality in our lives. This produces a sort of anaesthesia: we are inebriated with reality. The opposite of anaesthetics is aesthetics - where there's an-aisthesis, where sensation are missing- while aesthetics works the other way round, removing the anaesthesia of reality. So thee operation that Simone is carrying out is to highlight by caricaturing and underscoring a piece of reality, a tiny piece, an object, an iron. It's a highly aesthetic operation, which restores sensations, andit's highly political, because in one way or another it rebels against this spectacularised reality. In this sense it's a political operation, for it's an operation that leads us back to the sensitive perception of reality so that we can master it.
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