Gianluigi Colin

In his Mitografie (Mythographies), he sets out from a question: what have Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Venus become for us? His undertaking does not consist in leading us along the path of nostalgia. He sets out to trace distant survivals. He examines the many frequently distracted flourishings of classicism disseminated in the crevices of the present age. He uses myth as a special instrument, not to get away from “this” world, but to journey through it in a different way, entering its less explored byways. Hearkening to “speaking oracles”, he makes up postmodern frescos in which any centrality is disrupted. Intent on moving beyond the established rules of storytelling, he dwells on details found by chance. He extracts fragments that have no origin, which he merges to make eccentric almanacs that reveal a bold post-realism. In order to create his ungrammatical, imperfect, inexact frescos, Colin employs a complex technique. First he browses through newspapers; then he takes pages on which he finds “revealing” images; he crumples the pages, with a gesture of moral intolerance; then he photographs the “crumplings”; he prints the picture on newspaper pasted on a ground that is, in turn, made up of sedimentations of sheets of newspaper (a kind of “rewriting” of the classical technique of priming); finally he uses his hands to work on the material vigorously, introducing further folds. It is like witnessing a seductive shipwreck. The work has the appearance of wrinkled material, an arsenal of ravelled memories, a sea agitated by waves, an exercise endowed with an unexpected plastic and poetic consistency.