5 Dec .2020 - 25 Feb.2021
Il silenzio di un giorno, at Galleria Six in Milan, is a chapter of reflection on a particular period of the artist's practice and imagination.
In the mid-nineties Michele Zaza's work denotes some important characters well synthesized by Rainer Michael Mason's words :
"Michele Zaza's old works were personal and family theatre, intellectual and existential, chamber representation. By comparison, the more recent works are monumental and have adopted a more abstract but at the same time simpler and encrypted form since 1996. They concentrate on the face, work in the foreground, they are composed with sculptural forms, with a Cycladic aspect (only photographed)".
In the works exhibited at Galleria Six, dated 1996, such as Corpo sacro (4 black-white photos), Corpo centrale (3 black-white photos), Corpo esterno (2 black-white photos) - and in the great sequence Il silenzio di un giorno, 1997 (24 black-white photos), we see a more dry and visually incisive formal vocabulary, accompanied by new themes. Here the body and the face acquire centrality, becoming an interface with the world: they are continually confronted in a "hand-to-hand" with an abstract (objective) image, with another body from whose symbiosis a unique and "metaphysical" dimension is generated, a superior reality.
So in the works of the nineties Zaza relaunches a project of totalizing and unifying "space-body" of opposites. This project opens an ideal passage to designate a timeless symbolic body. It is no coincidence that in 1997 Michele Zaza wrote: "Birth and death embody the battle of humanity. Birth and death constitute the two extreme stages of existence: for there to be no more death there must be no more birth. Ideally, the evocation, the recomposition and the incarnation of a lost unity urge the mind to rebel against the idea of masculine and feminine. Becoming uterus, primary source of procreative energy, has a value of absolute autonomy and at the same time of unifying polydimensionality. A totality of being which, on the basis of beauty and tenderness, allows us to think of a new heroic body".
The sculptural presence, the abstract form that we see in the photos, as much as the artist's face, or the female face in the Central Body, emerge from the darkness of silence, a silence that for Zaza is "silence of thought", "the fastest movement of human time", that is, a meditative, absolute, ideally "timeless" time.
Moreover, meditative time also brings with it a circular time, as well demonstrated by the work The Silence of a Day, which gives the exhibition its title. The 24 black and white photos with the artist's face express the scan of the 24 hours of a day, their cyclicality. Zaza declares:
"The time of men is a linear time that always flows in the same direction, one is born, one grows, one dies.
But there is a circular time. Man disappears and then is reborn and does so infinitely perpetuating himself. It is not eternity nor earthly time. It is a time that philosophically can be defined as the moving image of still eternity. The sequence offers the possibility to slowly scan moment by moment representation on its own temporal circularity".
Giacomo Zaza
"archivio Michele Zaza"
Негізгі бет MICHELE ZAZA exhibition "il silenzio di un giorno" - GALLERIA SIX - Milano
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