Still_Life_Scan, Napoli: Vittoria Piscitelli

Still_Life_Scan is Vittoria Piscitelli's new project that investigates one of the key elements of the history of art, still widely debated: the relationship between reality and its representation. The challenge is to restore the complexity of reality, while questioning the relationship between the physical world and the ideal one and the impact that one exerts on the other.

Today the tangibility of reality is faithfully reproduced on technological supports thanks to continuous digital innovations, creating a type of image in which the representation appears to coincide with reality; Aesthetic illusions and disillusions that create that perceptual confusion according to which it seems that "images have passed into things" (Baudrillard).

The ambiguity of Vittoria Piscitelli's works arises precisely from the use of new digital technologies and insinuates itself with extreme naturalness in a highly heterogeneous and highly unique historical context such as that of the collection of the Gaetano Filangieri Civic Museum. Still_Life_Scan joins the great 17th and 18th century masterpieces of the collection, generating a chronological and stylistic misunderstanding that will only be resolved by investigating the artworks more closely.

The artist, thanks to his personal aesthetic of light, appropriates the tòpos of still life and in particular that of the eighteenth-century Flemish tradition. Vittoria Piscitelli's works, which at first glance seem to claim that fixedness and suspended time of the ancient still lifes, refer to a nature that is anything but inanimate. Numerous concepts related to contemporaneity, the new aesthetic and artistic conception of art but also and above all to the complexity of the current immaterial society are concentrated in Piscitelli's "paintings" of light.

The study of light and shapes overcomes the virtuosity of traditional pictorial practice, so the flowers placed on the surface of a scanner are transformed into a reality made of pixels that acquires the same expressive dignity and the same typically Flemish hyperreality of the works of Hyeronimous Galle, Maria Van Oosterwijck and other illustrious painters of the past.

The light beam of the digital instrument therefore marks the last frontier between real and virtual, between material and immaterial. Through the scans, the volume of the flowers is surgically reproduced by the machine that knows how to look more carefully than post-modern man.

Here, nature, which has always been the emblem of human freedom and limits, reveals itself in all its sublime transience, presenting itself to the clinical and cynical gaze of the scanner. The cracked black of the ancient oil backgrounds becomes the depth of darkness that escapes the lamp which instead captures that dust and uncertainties that the idea of contemporary perfection would like to eliminate forever, through analog and digital retouching.