Assembramento

A gathering is shown in the latest Urbansolid’s artwork.

What previously appeared to be a typical daily social practice of the human being, a physiological need, linked to the expression of our personalities through the relationship with the other, it is now denied. An imposition decided in the name of the common welfare. Almost ironically, this artwork permits us to welcome an illegal action within the walls of our houses, the gathering indeed.

A relic, in memory of a practice that, until recently, was perceived as natural, but which now is experienced as deplorable.

The faces that form the installation – anatomical casts of existing, living people – are cut in correspondence with the frame of the work. The represented people are blocked, captured in the precise instant the limitation was imposed.

A perimeter, a wall handed down, that has cut us, disrupting the continuity of our lives, of our relationships.

A puzzle of lives ignored in their singularity, in the specificity of the flow of any singular storytelling. Interrupted. Motionless. In such a situation the individual is thus debased, diminished.

The contrast, summarized in this work, uses as an expedient the faces of people, who, in the contemporary world, have become true icons. In fact, not only they express our personality, but they are accompanied by a series of values that we take for ourselves. Our image is used in social networks to convey our values in a visual and immediate way, to tell who we are.

The various lives, the numerous situations that animate the same picture, have not been considered. We are all an icon of ourselves, but, despite this, we have no value. We are not important, we are sacrificed, cut, broken by the border, stranded in an assembly.

The faces in this artwork are cut as if a huge stencil had been lowered from above. The geometric shapes are reminiscent of those of blocks, of neighbourhoods, of metropolitan areas that have suffered most from social distancing. A modern and invisible Berlin Wall has separated families, relationships and the stories of our lives.

This artwork describes all this, it narrates the many lives that animate the same painting and reminds us that we can be “special” too …special just like all the others!