Fake life // J&PEG (Antonio Managò-Simone Zecubi)

Opening on may 3, from 6.00pm

For the 2023 edition of ThePhair the Gagliardi e Domke gallery, which recently celebrated 20 years of activity, presents the artistic duo J&PEG (Simone Zecubi and Antonio Managò).

In addition to the presence at the fair with a monographic stand, Gagliardi e Domke will present in the gallery, at the same time, a J&PEG solo show dedicated to the most recent production, along with a brief view of their precedent artistic production.

The target of this double presence is to allow the public to observe the evolution of J&EPG’s work, about the process that leads to the final image.

Over the centuries, the innovations of the great authors have influenced other artists and have circulated on the European continent thanks to the collection of works or their printed reductions. Everything was dominated by the slow temporality of a pre-digital era where every image was the fruit of a stylistic, social and cultural evolution. Today’s iconosphere predicted by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s – which influences our perception of the world and our behaviors – is instead based on instantaneous processes and every aesthetic variation is conditioned, if not predetermined, on a global scale by what has been defined an ‘aesthetics of access’. The rituals of everyday life are marked by visual palimpsests – in which we participate as prosumers – where most of the identity differences are canceled out to conform to a visual grammar conditioned by the system of digital relationships within which we have been operating for over a decade. The world of social networks apparently places man at the centre, however establishing a game of masks, semblances and adhesions to the dominant narrative structures: these dynamics are the harbingers of the authorial reflection conducted in the recent works of the J&PEG collective. The figures portrayed in the Fake Life series (2019 – ongoing) are characterized by a sort of veil that hides their faces, generating a sensation with a contradictory flavor, reminding us of our condition as people who communicate through a digital filter, capable of creating a fracture between the reality principle and the semantic construction that we offer of ourselves. The drapery used by the duo to hide both the objects and the faces of the people portrayed have the function of causing short circuits in the representative and perceptive linearity that usually dominates the vernacular communication of our time, where the majority of the images produced respond to certain precise fees. Our gaze is generally placed in front of what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han defined as smooth communication which is «free from any negativity of the other and the stranger, and reaches maximum speed where the same reacts to the ‘same’ in a substantial visual uniformity to generate a linear, superficial message devoid of any singularity of content or form. On the contrary, in J&PEG’s works the objects depicted – such as vases – despite having a very specific nature and function, seem to acquire an aura of mystery which prevents them from being perfectly understood, thus leaving the door open towards multiple meanings and a metaphysics of gaze.

During their research, the artist duo wanted to create a close dialogue with a plurality of visual sources and in their previous works a series of reverberations from classical painting, cinema and the protagonists of the art of our time appear. In the last cycle, although these references remain which are deeply introjected by the artists, it appears clear how their gaze is questioning the dimension of proximity. Minimal elements appear in the formal construction of the works, borrowed from everyday life which, through the creative act, is elevated to an aesthetic dimension thanks to the feeling of amazement. Their complex creative process, generally dominated by rigor and formal expertise, has seen the generative potential of randomness creep in, which can modify the works in progress and lead them in unexpected directions. The first creative phase saw the authors create a still life photograph still life which was then projected onto three-dimensional elements, made of silver tubes, to create a second shot; during post-production the two photographs are then overlapped to achieve a visual stratification fruitful with reflections on the very status of the image. The latter, given its formal qualities, can lead one to believe in its merely digital and artificial nature, but on the contrary, it remains strictly connected to the physical tangibility of the objects used during its creation. In this sense the creative process has a primary value, and as it unfolds new questions open up on the possibilities of expanding the concept of photography, also stimulated by a performative attitude of the authors.

In the images in which the human figure is present we witness an introspective investigation that goes beyond the apparently glossy nature of the photographs which come closer to the idea of a psychological portrait. If in its early days photography was seen as a mirror of the world, wanting to mark the objectivity of the medium, in this case it becomes the tool for an internal conversation between Spectrum and Operator. On the one hand, the emotional impact of the people depicted is fixed, but a series of human instances connected to the present feelings of Antonio Managò (Busto Arsizio, 1978) and Simone Zecubi (Gallarate, 1979) of the J&PEG duo also reverberate on their faces. These recent works, despite staging varied subjects, are all inherent in a sense of waiting and suspension as if we were faced with a present capable of prefiguring new events already inherent on a formal level in the photographic compositions.