Corpo Ligneo Corpo Latteo

Magazzino is happy to announce the fifth solo exhibition by Antonio Biasiucci (Dragoni, 1961, lives and works in Naples) at the gallery. The exhibition will focus on two series, Corpo Ligneo (2020-2021) and Corpo Latteo (2017-2021), here presented to the public for the first time.

As always in his work, Biasiucci tends to a serial and fragmentary approach to reality, and its transfiguration through photography. Starting from his first and best known series of the 80s and 90s such as Magma and RES, to the more recent ones from the 2000s (Pani, Volti, Codex), in Biasiucci’s oeuvre there is a constant attention to the narrative possibilities of photography: often focusing on the particular, the detail, it returns the viewer an expanded vision, a universal sense of things linked to the primal aspects of existence.

The two series presented in the exhibition, Corpo Ligneo and Corpo Latteo, do witness Biasiucci’s ability to transform our perception of contingent and natural elements. On one hand, a series of cross-sections of tree trunks translate into highly evocative images, oscillating from the reference to a certain landscape painting, up to atmospheres pertaining to science-fiction or to Lovecraft’s visions. Biasiucci’s Corpi Lignei do immerse the viewer in a sort of fantastic taxonomy, where one is not sure of looking at a mysterious alien vessel, the remains of a volcanic island or, more simply, the skylines of an absurd and decaying urban landscape.

On the other hand, in the series Corpo Latteo the artist observes a distant world, evoking stellar explosions or ambiguous celestial bodies, depicted in their change of state. The reference to the body as an extended concept is a constant in Biasiucci’s work (Madri, Res, Ex Voto, Volti), as well its translation to an essential level, its transfiguration to other domains of the real, very often, beyond the reach of our glance. As the bread in Pani do suggest the matter of a far asteroid, the milk (itself a symbol of birth, of life, of coming-to-the-world) of Corpo Latteo do assume a gaseous state, gives the same sense of distance one has by looking at a remote place, in an unspecified “beyond”. This distance has almost its counterpoint to the presence of forms that do suggest a birth, the formation of an organism, almost as a quote to the Star-child who emerges from the deep dark in 2001: A Space Odyssey final vision.