Screams

Every human can recognise pain in the simple iconography of screaming faces, as pain is a dark mixture of individual and total. It's just the collective aspect of pain that allows its description and makes it possible for pain to reach words instead of remaining a silent experience. If pain can be described, it can be surely seen. These works are not set in an imaginary dimension, indeed they are definitely realistic. The pictures are reduced to essentials, devoid of decorations or representations that conceal the choice of subject as moral substance of the creative need. The works are descriptive, devoid of emphasis, explicitly figurative, devoid of decoration meant as field of fascination and indeterminacy diverting from the main sector of attention on which the subject dwells. There is no room for background, we just have the face we are obliged to deal with. There are only the facial gestures left, and body language is excluded. To some extent suffering is natural, as well as man's exposure to life is natural. From this point of view pain is innocent and blameless as much as its victims.

The figuration is very firm, in some cases out of focus, as if seen through a glass which doesn't allow us to see clearly, to know. The scream is the expression, the appearence of pain, but not its ultimate meaning. The picture is set up theatrically, as the scaffold is the pain inflicted and the scream is an expression of pain. The faces are in front view, almost hieratic, and have something sacred which is brutally violated. They are seen as sacrificial victims of boredom and apathy, victims of who wants to eliminate and perversely possess the embodiment of desires wich are pulsing, vital and coveted, but also feared and repressed by consciousness. The origin of pain is wrapped up in mistery, but does being concerned with pain make sense without a person suffering, or does being concerned about evil make sense without a victim showing its tragical presence? When pain results in anxiety and restlessness, archetypal fear of death, fear of what is opposed to life, the switch from nonbeing to being is possible. Suffering can become a source of creative power. In these pictures the relationship between style and subject is meant to be the vehicle of an opposite meaning; it points out some aspects that have nothing to do with art: spiritual death, decay of the suffering caused by the pain expressed through the scream. When life is annihilated, art has vanished. By contradiction, by random error or by a higher law, the theme of physical and inner disintegration, of loss of shape, is given just through shape, through the form of pictorical and visual art, in whose representation aesthetic values and classical statements dominate.
These faces are not symbols, but signs of something definite, wich undoubtedly refers to pain. They are meaning images, which address themselves to a spectator-witness with whom the author wants to establish a relationship. The immediate and instinctive reaction of the scream is accomplished not only in the desperate need of expressing the pain and free ourselves from suffering, but it also invokes a listener and demands a witness; the scream needs to be heard.

text by Elena Santoni