Curated by Antonio Maiorino

Bianco_Cold Landscapes is a composition of thirteen, plus a triptych, solos for an intimate Stabat.
Massimo Pastore (Napoli 1971) is performing in a deep loneliness, or to better say solitude. In contemporary art the act of performing is always meant to gather a public while in fieri, Pastore’s concept has given no chance to the public, it was his own performance and fight with his memories, his sorrow and his camera. He did not portrait himself, he portraited his body possessed by other lost bodies, borrowing his corpus to those characters not as playing a role but into a mutual flesh connection. It’s a contemporary De Profundis (De Profundis clamávi ad te Dómine/Dómine, exáudi vocem meam).

Loss not only meant as death but even as a past whose echoes are still like drums striking in his head. Knocking at his door hopelessly. This work can be compared, persevering on musical path, to Tubular Bells by Oldfield, when one man was able to record on his own every single part of the composition, playing every single instruments and, through an innovative technique at that time, putting together all parts to offer one of the most beautiful composition and was considered a new era in music art. Pastore’s concept goes further on. He plays what is impossible to see, he struggles and gives us the materialization of who is passed away and of what has no more material consistence but in our memories. The use of the photographic media thus is brought to its extreme potentiality, it becomes a new state of the art.

His Á rebours is dramatic, he goes back to places to take traces of those memories, he waits for the right day with that white snow as it is in his memory, he rapes that perfect moment, and it’s only the starting point of a conscious process, not a sudden epiphany, nothing is casual if you have the will to wait for that moment, and for sure will be coming, to shut the Eye of the Reason firmly. On that cold landscapes, but as he writes ‘cold does not exist’, the performance will take place. Dressed (or buried) in new identities his love builds up a new scene, the real one, where all pieces of this chess game will take their place. The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), who was very sceptic about making art with a camera because of the absence of what he defined the ability to live again in your intimacy that poetic intuition, seeing Pastore’s art would for sure change his mind. This new project by Massimo Pastore it’s a field where he is playing on the time paradox synchrony/diachrony. What has happened slowly melts into white, or what it is still going to happen into the white takes its own space. It is now the public that plays the game. Will the public examines the instant or will it compare those forthcoming moments following the traces the artist has left on the path? White becomes thus element of time and consciousness lapse so that only the eye should understand how much there is of ashes or of snow. And the believer, believing in what he sees, will hear Plinius The Young words: - To the still trembling eyes everything looked changed and covered of a mountain of ash, as it was just snowed.

Supported by:
Comune di Siracusa - Assessorato alle Politiche Culturali Comune di Siracusa

Sponsored by:
Galleria PrimoPiano Napoli
Cantine Astroni