Francesco Arena for years has been working in the photography and video thematic field.
His research, firstly oriented toward the external,
on the analysis and de-composition of the body, and its potential way (likewise
Bodybuilding for example), it has slowly changed to an internal one, nearly introspective.
In his works, the corporeality is tested like a borderline between
internal and external, so it becomes, almost, a kind of neutral place:
a place where the individual compares him to the external world reality
Recently Arena has returned to the photographic field and creates big images
which he calls " still life ", but they are far away from the media tranquillity
of that style. Strong colours define the balance between
shock, idolatry, and enunciating of social evil.
In "Still life for lifelike people", the ambiguity of communication is debated-
through a handling of linguistic art codes- in the choice of an advertising technique.
In these photos, the artist spreeds like images of consumer,
Some messages anything but ephemeral and superficial.
The dramatic metaphoric force of these extreme conditions of uneasiness, it is
Further stressed by illusion of a codified and familiar pattern like the advertising.
What is important, it is "the cutting" and "the way" in which we cut.
Really, we don't see as a whole, however we see "cut".
It is our "way of cutting" that defines our perception of things.
And, everybody has got his own means.
Inevitably, we cut to define, to communicate,
to understand and to synthesize. We cut to build ourselves.
Arena cuts, he is suspended, aseptic by emotions.
More then "to cut", his own way is an "cutting unevenly": a precision objective and
"no-sentimental" definition. He cuts unevenly on the bodies, on sensations, on concepts;
With opposite aim, he sublimes to the sublime.
Whit a soft cynicism of cutting, he subjects visions, apparently away from opinion.
He takes photographs of bodies, rather of contours, than flesh, matter and emotions:
the bodies of image. The bodies that build themselves, the bodies dissolving,
the bodies changing, in any case, the bodies of imagine.
And then, the cut, gradually, goes inside, it goes inside the interior flesh, like a more
interior look.
He goes back, out of the things, the products and composes" Still life", big advertising and
patined images, that don't contain some products, but "subjects".
"Heavy" subjects, social subjects stopped by an objective anatomist,
by a cataloguist that deranges into determine a relation of impertinence
between "the container" and " the way".
Just some impertinent images. Apparent paradoxes, but the paradoxes as such, are
"litmus paper" and …they capture the thought.
But, in Arena's work, "the result", the outcome, doesn't immediate, obvious yet,
It is "mediate" from a time too, a reduced time, but time: his time.
The time of his machines, the mental machines and the shot machines.
Just one of the objectives it is to stop his time by his expositions, by his cut.
Fragmentary documentary films breaking up in stopped dowels,
beautiful already only too see because they are "mediated" in aesthetic;
"loghi" and "luoghi" di tempo.
" Logos" in meaning of word: time words.
"Loghi" in meaning of brands: time brands.
"Luoghi" in meaning of contemporaney time places: " luoghi di tempo".

26th dicember 2000

Gabriel Ventaglio

"AUTOBIOGRAFICA"

The option to not feel, to not look, the good sense, the logic, the events,
the opinions, the recommendations.
We must to pay attention to have power
of us, we must to pay attention to
the ingenious amateurs; sometimes it is difficult to know if I'm thinking or if she's
thinking some thoughts; sometimes it sure, it is an " artisticita'" that connected both.
Who is thinking whom?
At the beginning of every extreme resolution, or opposite note, I'm embarrassed, uncertain, injuried by innate worsening sensation of which I can't speak
and I can't answer.
You aren't obliged to understand and I don't feel the need to persist, you are
the one who doesn't know when I'm walking near her or I'm breathing her breathing.
This night a firefly is shining upon my window and I'll keep it
in an old tin together with her and hers secret that gives light to my thought.
Now, drag me inside you, carry me, the winter is over, I'm defrosting,
I'm coming from the mistake, from the insanity, from the princedom
of senses, you must free yourself from which.
In secret, you were the image in my mirror; I pulled you upwards, near me.
I was inside you, visible but opposite.
Now the time has stopped, I'm waiting for the light of a shudder that I'll never turn off
otherwise, I couldn't see you again.
My thoughts are leaving me, I have no senses or sense, I have no limit
like the universal entropy of the white and the giant masses;
the whole range of cosmic dimensions it's falling out of my mouth in the dimension of a kiss.
Between microcosm and macrocosm, between chaos and absence of aim,
between plankton and philosophy, it is how staying inert to honour the absent things
Those move themselves slow or quickly and not independently like if they
should generate life with them.
I'm heavy advancing, through the refuge of expressive destinations, maybe
I'm making too wide gestures because they believe to stop them, too wide also to me..
I'm thirsty swallowing the last bit of light; there aren't yesterdays and tomorrows,
not yet. There aren't snow-white words here, not yet.
The thoughtful look is tired to hint at complexity, it's becoming simpler
it's inclining to linearity.
Dreams and symptoms of the our need to be remembered, to be fed with a little
of memory without never to be looked for and without even to be saluted;
over my skin only mute colours are being.
I can be happy picking up rags in my quiet labours, but where is
the certain if you have changed? And, could I say that I've wrong?
I'm interesting in two things: the technique of love and the technique of art
and to both I've arrived through ingenuity and roughness.
I began in both with heresies: if the only education is more valiant in the sorrow,
Why is it philosophically forbidden to be pitiless toward the our neighbour,
training him in the best way?
Don't wake the love before it wants.
A match is burning in my throat, not even through my throat that weren't
a flaming sentences, but you don't wait for me if you like
the absolute things; you can't build an absolute love, you can build an absolute goodness
leaving out the sex.
Only you are away from your life and you are not thinking to the others' sorrow if you are thinking to your sorrow…
the fault it's always our.
It happens that anything is not enough for take all that remains,
it happens that something remains and you don't know what it means, like
the simplicity of the things that you love, how the sweet dream
can help and you don't know how it'll end.
Don't believe to strip the world when you are telling stories or facts,
you are intrigued more and more and you cannot choose between
the mistruth in the art or the hope that, while you're storing up words, the goods words
could stick to you.
Sex, alchol, blood.
The three Dionysian moments of life, it's impossible to escape, or the one or the other.
When a word, a fact, a suspect gave us a strong passional trouble,
it comes the moment, while we're distressing ourselves, which we realize we don't remember
anymore the word, the fact, the suspect. The passion is more and more deep, love is made by desire of knowledge.
Let my centre be the rotation axis for your body, let me
wander between your pillars, along your collonade; don't let me stay on,
walk, enjoy myself, and lose myself in you.
Only you, before others, you could see the light.
Let me swim through your delta, through the bowed heads, let me
taste the black salt of the land, let me be a fish, I need your
sea, let me put on stage a carnal show during the course of your life.
We are only spirit orphans of the ghosts in the world that lived in Europe.
Ideas for improve the knowledge of the world.
A telephone- answering for the last questions, as instruction to commit suicide.
New miracles, new fears are coming back for conventional bond, for take away
from the head the coagulated thoughts; the universe inside us, with us the inhumanity.
I'm another, a multiplicity of others embodied to the crossroad with an element
of partial enunciation that have access from every region of the individually identity.
The body is a new body, the sensuality is no more a component of the human being, it is
something different, it is a form of art, of technology, of human invention.
Sensuality and emotions go over the biology, sex is made outside the body,
the your body, I don't need you anymore, I want the new bodies, the bodies
of connexions: women, heterosexuals, gays, lesbians, transexuals, and transgenders.
The metabolism of the endless, typical to every connexion is not
forever fixed, I'm feeling a new aesthetic power of feeling, of feeling you.
I'm feeling a new aesthetic power of feeling, of feeling you.
The police force is groping in the dark like the researchers in front of an epochal criminal,
they are the only and the absolute avant-garde artists to indicate the new limits
of the passions and of the bodies' and the mind's dissection
that gives itself no rest in the continuity of the thought.
I want live in a dimension of contamination, of violation, of rebellion,
of alteration, of transgression and of surprise, I want live in a new universe
of passions loaded
with images and with imagination, a mutant stage where the bodies
and their representations change, the minds change and our sensations change; I want that the
emotions are prosthesises, like grafts, like extensions of myself, of
my body that is going to get a place for an identity free to choice their mutations.
The sex is a way to break with you and another person, the sex is the most direct way
of communication, love is what creeps into the complication of our thoughts.
The light is becoming stronger, her forms more little, and her shapes
are just perceivable, the blinding is increasing and, finally, through her,
I've came back in the place where I've never been before, but it isn't here
that I'm looking for me and maybe it isn't somewhere else, so in nowhere land
maybe inside of me or inside a sunflower, are you hearing my shining laughter?
Another reason to cut over an ear.
Like me, this drown image was ideal and many people had imagined her.
So, the skin, the eyes, the hands the legs, the
Sex, the hair, the lips Become lands of signification,
horizon of passage, vertigo of multiple identities, geography of nervous system
Those are extending in the universe, new maps unidentificate.
We're continuing to make the story again, but
Inversely we're making the story on our body.
I look for the true face of the people, I like uncover their way to see themselves and
I try to love this way; I take care to uncover the net
of contaminations, the power that is expressed from the bodies in their meeting.
The body is an image, at the same time the image is either a physic or
immaterial dimension, it is the essence, it is the harmony, it is a diaphragm between what
there is and what there is not. I would like to meet only the special bodies of the art of the theatre, of the
music; the bodies that are able to change in something different.

9th March 1997

Francesco Arena

(cut up from texts by Mc Ewan, Lindo Ferretti, FAM, Pavese, Consoli, Clementi, Fiumani, Doną)