In recent times we are witnessing a hybridization between reality and virtuality. Art transforms reality, subverts it and offers it to us as an instrument of critical reinvention of modern times.
Aldo Chaparro’s sculptures made with bent steel are the result of his ongoing relationship with the material. The sculptures’ violent nature creates a great contrast with the nature of the steel sheets, as the artist kicks, bends, and jumps on them using nothing but his body and his own weight. As the accurate mirroring on the steel sheets distorts itself, the sculptures allow us to experience reality on a parallel way. They trigger our sense of exploration using the sculptures’ surface as its theater, creating reflections (on both senses) on several and very different ways.
In addition, in his totem sculptures, the wood retains the eternal qualities of the material and by using the simplest possible means, the inherent nature of the aesthetic object shifts and becomes the path to deep thoughts that exist just by occupying space, giving us the sensation of being suspended in time, just like the Noh theater of the Muromachi period.
On the other hand, for Giuseppe Lo Schiavo reality is a fluid and fragile phenomenon seeking to redefine it. He uses new technologies to conceive his photographs as elaborated sets of a virtual space, creating the illusion of an open window (both metaphorical and literal) on a new reality and evoking images which are ancient and futuristic, artificial and natural at the same time.