START WEARING LIFE

Diary of an ordinary life In order to seize life, one must penetrate the in-between, the exact point where something ceases to be and something else is about to come to life. In this way art can be thought of as “couch grass”, as something always growing in the middle; it never settles on what is fixed, constant, motionless, but moves forward through exorbitant lines of flight that cannot be stopped. The in between is photography, the in between is life. Where to find life? In the middle, in the crossing. Start Wearing Life tells us about a similar try: to get over the limit of the photogram, to overcome the fixity of an isolated moment. The road becomes three-dimensional, the white lines thicken, the motion is there, palpable, in perpetual escape. And again, the bed is a set of folds in shaky positions: a break that seems already over. Truth or fiction? The artist never writes about his neurosis; autobiographism is always an excuse. Real experience and personal feelings only play a minor role in the artistic experience. In other terms, art is a superior form of fiction that places truth on a much more disturbing level, never on a basic one. Looking at these photos, one can understand that they hide, under a cloak of diarism, of memory – the father? love? The “by your side when” – an almost indefinable element of raw objectivity, of disturbing clarity. It is the effect of a radical decontextualization: life’s moments lose their warmth in the decomposition, in the fragmentation of a click, of a “capture”. A warm, clear and subjective memory, with a gentle temporality, becomes, for the external observer, an hallucinated vision, a cold, distancing and marmoreal journey. Faces of statues, showers with flowers, fields and refineries: an itinerary that becomes vaguely Lynchian. Narration is not missing, but it is no more the narration of life, of chronological events; it is a higher, arbitrary narration – the round recalls the round – that looks out onto the fate, while not indulging in it, always hanging in the balance between two worlds, two polarities. Start Wearing Life doesn’t want to resign, but always remains in the middle, a pure elegy of a further life – the art? The origin? The perversion? – which never leaves this earth, the earth of memories, of affections, of familiar warmth. Which life? Which lives? Giulio Piatti