Shown in Compétition #1.
Synopsis
In 1971, painter Giuseppe Capogrossi, architect Maurizio Sacripanti and sculptor Alfio Castelli won a contest for an ‘artistic fence’ that would enclose the Faculty of Law building in Bari (Italy). Completed in 1972, this piece of public art is now forgotten and degraded. S MMM is a revisitation of the shapes of that fence, a homage to that passionate confrontation of practices that led to that project.
Text from the selection committee
The artistic practice of Italian artist Ignazio Fabio Mazzola is based on the creation of extremely short films, whose exhibition resists standardization by a loop projection: Mazzola’s films need to appear and disappear quickly. His films can be divided in three bodies of work (that sometimes intersect): autobiographical films, artists’ portraits and films on architecture. S MMM is the latest instalment in this latter body of work, where he interprets avant-garde architectural projects through a process of observation, synthesis and abstraction. In S MMM the shapes of a university fence become the raw material for a playful and polyrhythmic short film, in collaboration with Italian experimental band Lo Flopper.
– S.M.
In S MMM and in other films you made in the past, the interpretation you make of an architectural project or of another work of art you’re studying is deeply rooted in the act of reducing, synthesizing, visually a shape, a sign, a moment. You’ve been working with film and video, but I wonder if this aspect of your artistic practice is related to drawing or painting?
I consider myself, first and foremost, an illustrator, my basic training is dual: artistic and technical. A fundamental exercise for my current practice was to synthesize, even in the open air, with a few lines and sometimes with makeshift tools, the images of the city, the architectures studied first through books and then through direct experience. Painting is a constant reference in my work. My first video-portraits show a relationship with the pictorial material that has grown increasingly over the years, from the detail of the hands contaminated with yellow and cobalt blue (in the 2015 piece S _ S) to the extreme gesture of handing over the camera to the painter (in T. - G. 3.2 quasi 43, which I made in 2017) .