C-CUT – Homo Ab Homine Natus is the third solo exhibition by Francesco Vezzoli at the Galleria Franco Noero, and the first to be shown in the spaces in Piazza Carignano 2.

 

The title work of the exhibition takes to its extreme the artistic practice that Vezzoli has adopted ever since he first started making sculpture: an aesthetic of the pastiche brought about by a combination of different, and apparently totally unrelated elements, in a way that is arbitrary and yet based on irrefutable historical criteria.

This is a style that has its roots in a reinvention of a common practice in Roman times, which was that of copying older Greek works, without making any distinction in value between the original and the copy. Indeed, the latter were made in a very free manner, inserting details and elements from the world in which the creator of the copy and his patron lived. Even though in a different way, this was also true of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, when sculptors – even the most famous – were called in to “complete” original Roman works that had been found broken or missing some of their parts.

C-CUT is based on a typical twentieth-century concrete garden sculpture of a Roman soldier. On the back of this fake antique work is a bronze “cut” – an iconographic reference to Lucio Fontana’s Spatial Concepts – from which emerges an original marble head of a man, dating from the Late Republic (about 50 BC-AD 37).
While the sculpture rotates on its own axis like a sort of haunting musical box, the viewer is called upon to watch a quite extraordinary event: a “superhuman” birth, in which a man comes into the world violently bursting through the back of another man.

The display installation concept by Filippo Bisagni takes up the entire space of the gallery and is designed as a journey that prepares and takes leave of the visitor before and after the viewing of the sculpture: the atmosphere that fills the entirely empty rooms recalls the visionary world of certain Italian horror films of the 1970s, which often owe much to the mythology that binds the city of Turin to the occult. The soundtrack by Wendy Carlos exacerbates the mood, which wavers between the horrific and simple childish amusement.