PIERMARIO DORIGATTI
PAOLO DOLZAN
LUCIANO RAGOZZINO
Curated by Claudia Ponzi
Finissage 25.02.25 h18-21
FOGLIO SALA
Critical text by Dario Borso
Myth in the strict sense abdicated its function in the West as soon as it became the subject of discourse-logos. At least from Plato, who used it as a simple illustration of his thought, but above all with the modernity and the turning point of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless it has survived, in underground forms and often as a symptom. Walter Benjamin showed some aspects of it in Paris, the capital city of the 19th century, and already Sigmund Freud had traced it to his patients, where the myth of Oedipus, from public rite in the Greek tragedy, was reduced to a very private complex.
It was also and above all Eros, primordial god son of Aphrodite who soon lost his consubstantiality with orgiastic rites to suffer, already with the last of the tragic poets Euripides, a splitting between love aimed at happiness and love devoted to torrid life (and Plato, in accord, in the Symposium distinguished a celestial-urania Aphrodite from a vulgar-pandemian). Christianity only brought evolution to its extreme consequence by opposing love-agàpe (the Latin caritas) to the carnal one.
But it’s not over: the desacralization of eros called its desecration. Thus, at the dawn of the twentieth century, Alfred Jarry published two anti-novels, Messalina and Il supermaschio, in which excess is the master: female super-prostitution and male superperformance, both extreme to freak phenomenon by a hyperbolic irony as the royal way of access to the mysteries of the god.
On this ideal trail, which has marked many avant-garde in the world of art, we now place the three variations presented here in a small rite of an exhibition:
the Venus by Paul, no longer anadioméne, that is emerging from the waters, but immersing in the amniotic fluid of the unconscious;
the Priapus by Piermario, phallic deity that irresistibly recalls the sarcastic Eros and Priapus of Carlo Emilio Gadda;
the Europe by Luciano, a nymph kidnapped by Jupiter camouflaged in bull, available and professional to the point of representing, more than the eros, the euros…
