Armonia Meravigliosa

Behind the name of vedovamazzei are concealed Stella Scala and Simeone Crispino, a couple of neapolitan artists moved to Milan for a long time. Their art goes across means, languages and themes with extreme freedom, often inspired by the situation out of which they arise, by casual encounters, by news stories and even banal everyday life. Attentive, disenchanted and a bit perverted observers, ready to catch the most unbecoming aspect of the things, the element out of place, vedovamazzei put under discussion the art, techniques, iconographic models, contaminating them with graftings of the most ordinary reality, refusing every contemplative detachment in favour of a sharp and, sometimes, absurd humorism.

In the occasion of the exhibition at Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, the couple will present an instalation of great visual impact: the reconstruction of a bog of the pre-Cambrian geological era, made of red clay brown ground and water, in which grows geneticaly treated waterlilys whose petals are not white but decorated with the motive insipred by Jackson Pollock’s “dripping”. The artists declare to have created this transgenic waterlilys thanks to a collaboration with a team of scottish biologists, but the process used to obtain these marvellous flowers remains a mistery. At any rate, due to this new form of fantastic and fantasticated life, the ancient contradiction between nature and culture seems finally surpassed: the art germinates in a spontaneous way and has its own place in the creation. After bringing this landscape, at the same time ancient and new, within the walls of the gallery, vedovamazzei follow the usual procedure of the set back, of an improper use of available means and spaces: they transform the open courtyard in an interior by putting in center a big crystal chandelier that, to an attentive eye, reveals the form of a human skull: the skull of Ho Chi Min. Inspired by an event during the war in Vietnam- the sudden attack of the vietcong on the Thanksgiving Day- and by the comment of an american journalist who wrote that the fla sh of the bombs that night of the 23 of November appeared in the sky as the most beautiful of baroque chandeliers, vedovamazzei presents us another restless image, a reflection on absurdity and brutality of life, sharp and fierce but not without poetry.