Ossimori
by Gianluca Marziani

Evolved thought cannot exist without the freedom to develop fully

Words from not so long ago…
Dario Carmentano works with symbols of high anthropologic value, with sacred icons, with objects of worship, but also with words and swear words of strong socio-cultural impact, as proof of meticulous analysis of collective devotion and social rituals and of popular culture and it’s most truthful aspects. The artist looks to the most restored and primordial of symbols, to the reasoning of phonetic and cultural roots of a phrase, to the heart of many icons that we often don’t perceive in their original integrity. To do this, he uses irony and desecration, upsetting popular (and often populist) clichés humanistically, with respect to modus and concise visual calibre. The same languages confirm the moral strength of a trip that moves through our lifetime without any fear of doubt, a mixture that is filled with simplified technology and manualisms, yet without ever being overly dogmatic. 

DARIO CARMENTANO or DC, or D.C. Dopo Cristo (A.D. After Christ’s Death), Doubt Carmentano, Del Carmentano (Of Carmentano), Dopo Carmentano (After Carmentano) (Democrazia Cristiana, Christian Democracy, no please)… always after the rhetoric of the popular message after the initial dilemma. A thought after a first image, done to recreate the second level of a visual apparition that becomes an aggressive and transgressive work, violent and yet sentimental, crude and bloody in its synthesis of emotions and conflicts. 

Ethically correct artists aren’t afraid to confront great collective themes. They challenge dialectic forms, linguistic archetypes, symbolic images and icons. They play with the truth (relative), to make the answers relative (creative) and reinforce the question of doubt.

What collective entities trigger the greatest number of questions? Obviously S +&+ R, written as if it were a mathematical equation is crazy (because its delirium we’re talking about here, the news shows this clearly while the results of the equation aren’t so clear). Sex on one side. Religion on the other. Like two antithetical but adjacent poles that create dynamic politics, governing reasons, self-governments and oligarchies, diplomatic incidents and individual deliriums… 

The social combination of Sex + Religion = psychotic explosions of moralistic hysteria that assault morals turning them into pure indecorous morality (imagine the usual mainstream "FOX News" bigots and you understand the comical contrary emphasis of the dialectic, militant guerrilla phrase). Now lets change the tone, (more normality, but of what kind?) and lets imagine a dinner with the appropriate people, those who live freedom as a definitive principal (?) of a truly evolved democracy (??). Even if we modify formalities, the new phrase has one particular that would not change: the two arguments arise out of the center of humanity. One can say that moralisms don’t exist in beautiful conviviality yet, entering the altruist’s head, we can see that indifference doesn’t exist either. Sex and religion, especially when they collide, trigger thoughts and activism of all sorts…verbal violence and fights, incidents and accidents, bestiality and other things. But they also trigger, (and from this comes the look of the sane, not the obscurity of normal people - who is normal, after all? - but of the sane) beautiful and important things, universal values of humanity that live both moments with spiritual sacredness, interior freedom, the intensity of the moment and individual relation. Sex represents freedom of the body (with the consistent presence of a visionary and desirous mind) that follows the trajectory of instinct. Religion represents freedom of the spirit which follows the trajectory of reason. This is how it should be in a healthy society that has metabolized Eschilo and the democratic history of Oreste. Unfortunately, this isn’t what happens, which confirms that history doesn’t always teach us, but often feeds oblivion in the minds of the weak. Sex and religion are two universal detonators around which all individual and community dynamics move. Two poles of civilization that in great ancient cultures (some, obviously) mixed in a baptismal and renewing manner. Who knows whether or not excessive technology hasn’t lowered the testosterone of pure beauty?

Censure...
...an impalpable accumulation of pressure that DC continuously challenges, above all when he uses creative intuition to follow the necessity of the message. Let’s remember that only a necessary path can create definitive openings to works of art. The right way is exactly in the connection between the individual necessity (the artist who must create) and the efficient synthesis of an expressive intuition. DC works with this hypersensitive diaphragm, creating works that have direct iconographic support with solid impact, precisely because the censoring code breaks down with clear communication and a rising subtext.

Anthropological Value
Human nature and individual roots, are the solid platform upon which DC’s work is built. Certainly Matera has been very important in his visual training. It makes sense to talk about the spiritual energy of the place...of hidden tensions that continuously reappear, slipping through the arteries of thought, in the blood of formulation, in the muscles of the final work. To grow up in the Sassi means to perceive the contrast between antiquity and progress in an anomalous way.

Icons
DC works on the open re-elaboration of icons of great ethical value. In language after language, what counts are the semantic overturnings which the images create for the viewer. One analyzes the work and recognizes different forms of the present: a cross reference to the printed page, another to television, yet others to the internet, to the tourist subculture, to popular and religious occult, to the most banal pornography...everything appears to be and become something more than it is.

The Aura of the Work
The work is used as a catalyst, where the image distils the fruitful and complex seed of doubt. DC gets at the obvious and visible, from secret, unique and unexpected angles. But like every traveller moving towards a goal, he works under the weight and pressure of censorship. He has to defend himself in order to protect the physical creation of his thought, but with an advantage regarding the altruistic code of silence of the underworld in which he expresses himself. DC enjoys that uncommon liberty, derived from the protective film that surrounds artistic images. Lets call it the aura of the work, an indefinable something that leads to consciousness through synthesis. A protective film that frees hot issues from juridical paths (almost always) and from the morals applicable to prosaic news (always). Sexual acts, iconoclastic transgressions, physical violence, behavioural ambiguity, various types of rudeness: through iconographic purity, only visual art allows investigation of the noble and ignoble, absurd norms and normal absurdity, the known and unknown, the truly beautiful and the truly ugly. It has an advantage that is ever more precious and which must be protected from any sort of external limitation.

Open contextualizations
There are particular cases which contextualize DC’s project. For example, when the fear of censorship triggers tautological reflections regarding imposed barriers. Here, lateral and implicit provocation works, sending the artist’s message, which breaks the censorship’s aim, while simulating restriction within the work. Think of Julia Scher who describes social control through closed circuit installations, David Lynch style. Or "The File Room", by Antoni Muntadas, a Kafkaesque space with 800 metallic archives and eight Macintosh computers on line to access a collection of censorship cases in cultural contexts. Two exemplar modalities that render censorship a linguistic theme without influencing language negatively any longer. 

Self Limitations (that don’t regard DC)
At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are cases of artists who limit themselves for contextual reasons, avoiding radical ideas that block thought: and here is where the mechanism implodes, precisely because works of art cannot sustain anything that is forced (unlike cinema, for example, in which the amount of funding and production/distribution restrictions can dampen the original project). Italian cinema lost hits when the writers supported television language, copied the past without deviation and blocked the strong themes of a generational culture. Films that are self-censored, bordering on a lack of courage by the author, have been gravely damaging. However, it can be said that creativity in general suffers forced mediation. Apart from a few cases in which limiting restrictions are metabolized within the dominant bulimic of the idea. Strong ideas can then encompass external conditioning, sometimes becoming a stimulating conditioner. But one must know how to manipulate the mechanism with extreme wisdom, and above all, one must put their thought at the center of the expressive organization chart.

Genius loci (that do regard DC)
An invisible form of censorship regards the terrible disease of linguistic globalism, a creative "virus" that influences and weakens visual expression. In a few words, we see an attitude that is first mental and then formal, which includes various artists of similar elaborative and expressive models. A communicative approach that thus deprives the geographic reality of an indispensable "genius loci". Honest art demands, on the contrary, solid roots. It wants a sense of its own reality and attitudes. It seeks profound synthesis to communicate an individual need from the collective valence. Works of art never speak with the monothematic voice of sterile narcissism, nor can it copy without making progress. At the same time, art cannot uphold the "rudeness" of a public unprepared for risks. Every artistic image includes courage and strength, beauty and the utility of new questions. It creates great openings with minimal waste, which becomes sediment in the memory. The consequent answer lives within the eyes, even more courageous, of the viewer, in the capacity to see beyond the epidermis, in modifying one’s own life through sublimations of the truth that we call works of art. 

Adjacent Contextualizations
A crucifix immersed in urine. A Madonna on top of a sewer inlet pierced by a huge tube. First Andres Serrano, then Robert Gober: talk about the short-circuit between sanity and sacrilege, between heaven and blood, between the spirit and pulsating flesh. There are two hypotheses, deep down, the cathartic entrance to prosaic life within the body of holiness. Two breathtaking images that talk about impossible censorship, precisely because freedom resides in the circuits of the mind, in thought and in every instinct. There are many extreme images in contemporary art. Some are breathtaking, for example the deformed freaks of the baroquesque photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin; others are disturbing like the analysis of a cadaver that gets closer to the photo of Dino Pedriali; and others are sublime perfections like those of Mantegna; even more fragmented and "classic" are the photos of Andres Serrano with cadavers from a New York obituary and some acts of extreme sex. Sex and death, anyways and always: confirm that the poles of freedom are measured between Eros and Thanatos, where penetration and disappearing determine the eroticism of altruistic curiosity.

There are some examples in which sex and sexuality are filtered by technical processes that mirror a precise mental intent. This confirms that the actual image requires ulterior steps and innovative angles. Visual evolutions in which censorship is demolished with adaptations for one’s own time, for the values of today and for the needs of a contaminated culture. And this is what happens along Dario Carmentano’s path, from his continuous specimens of real, popular and rhetorical images to the limits of television obscenity. An episode of "La Vita in Diretta" would be enough to symbolize an implicit little taste of the demystifying poison which the artist instils. A vulgar world in its exhibition of domestic falsehood and pathetic exhibitionism. A tiny, ancient world for tiny, media ambitions, the grotesque kingdom of Fellini which DC chews and metabolizes with acid sarcasm, ferocious irony and adequate cynicism.

Oxymorons
In the words of Zingarelli: "A rhetoric figure that is made from reuniting two contradictory words, paradoxically, into the same expression..." Is DC already an oxymoron? Is visual art a gigantic oxymoron? Are normality and folly other oxymorons? For personal certainty, there is all the certainty of chance.

Let’s use our sight well... Allowing the long images of the infinite geography of the imagination to flow.... Feeding freedom to he who investigates the world in order to understand the origins of their own discomfort... Meeting any challenge in which the old rules find new solutions. DC works in a discordant flow that takes capillary directions. He undresses bodies and religion, investigating death at work, he savours evil and absurdity, he messes around with beauty and ugliness, he overturns traditions and betrayals... thematic fields that usually feed external pressure, the wrath of censorship, sick moralism, unfounded social fears. Camps of life that drive sane thought forward, the courage to grow, the energy and beauty inside the day to day.

Wishing you a good tour and evasion.... That your escape may be within your souls.