The Reflection of the "Other"
Giancarlo Papi
Globalisation and generalised, uncontrolled growth are tending to transform
the arts into a kind of linguistic conformism wherever the culture of
multiplicity and its multiethnic drives could actually bring about the
subversion of this frightful output of meaning which tends to restrict
the individual's possibilities. In the light of current social changes,
which have now reached a point where it is really possible to talk about
forms of transnationalisation, one of the possible effects of individual
action in our time is that of mixing together with the other while holding
onto one's own identity, preserving one's own breath and one's own precious
uniqueness.
Art, in all its linguistic facets, has always spoken to us of identity.
In the first place it talks - implicitly or explicitly - of its author's
identity, that is, shedding light on the depth of the individual dimension
of the concept of identity. Secondly, it includes collective identity,
at the same time as the work affirms its own historical roots, that
is, the spirit of the time out of which it is born.
Today, the concept of identity is one of the central issues in artistic
research, identifying not so much with works of art as with the artist's
consciousness at the time. Out of his or her conceptual, projectual
and pragmatic activity comes research in which identity means oneself
becoming the receiver of the encounter with everything which is other
than oneself, and at the same time with the explicit complexity of oneself.
This aspect represents a true paradigm whereby the artist's imaginative
resources are developed. This is the territory in which Anton Roca's
poetry is renewed. His theoretical thought coincides with the practice
of art, in the sense that when confronted with his work we are present
at the concrete realisation of ideas in the form of actions, in works,
in "behaviour". His expanded concept of art embraces not only
traditional techniques and disciplines, such as painting and sculpture,
but any creative activity within the scope of human existence.
At a time like the present, for Anton Roca art needs to be the result
of starting out afresh from zero, as a social demand in the awareness
of one's own historical roots. The pulse of the present is necessary
in order to look into the future, transforming what exists and "material"
culture into poetic code.
In the artist's recent research, the concept of the work of art as a
threshold is accentuated, of art as a channel for more attentive, sensitive
experimentation, for observation leading to a reading of problems and
complexities with the aim of extracting richness from them. Thus, with
coherence and strength, the relationship between art and life, art and
society, art and politics, aesthetics and ethics, continue to determine
Anton Roca's work which, making use now of the mirror, dissects, divides,
multiplies and reconstructs reality.
The mirror is the instrument which directs the sensory mechanisms for
which art is the vehicle towards ambiguity. It is the instrument which
destroys space, which places at risk the very concept of reality while
bringing it into the unsettling realm of the apparent, of artifice.
This is how right becomes left; high, low; forward, backward; over,
under; within, without; here, there; before, after; one, the other.
A constant in Anton Roca's work is the search for that hypothetical
point midway between the opposite poles. Equidistant, equivalent but,
at the same time, including both extremes.
The mirror is little more than a modest tradesman's tool. Nevertheless,
it origin speaks to us of an archaic time, magical in nature, which
Anton Roca seems to evoke constantly. An apparently simple instrument
which is in fact labyrinthine like few others. Able to create the paradoxical,
tautological vicious circle of making us see while we are busy looking
at ourselves in it.
What the mirror provokes is division, broadening, duplicating oneself,
the unique extraction of the two from one; of ourselves, our reflection,
our double, our replicant. All in all, the other.
