Il bambino diventerà molto vecchio solo se non si riconoscerà mai . ( L’oracolo di Tiresia )

 Dentro la televisione.

The technical and industrial imaginary of the media makes the investigation of the essence of images seemingly vain since it does not seem to worry about the nature of what touches us and involves us if not in the ethical choice, even before aesthetics, to want to live in reality or in its image. The Warolian prophecy of the "minute of celebrity", democratically considered possible for each American citizen, seems to have turned into a "minute of identity" because now participation in the media world seems an indispensable confirmation of the worldly presence. The capture of a somatic scheme within the repertoire of true images - icons of the contemporary is the confirmation of existence through its emphatic manifestation, the image widespread and dominant because dominated by inflated knowledge, by re - knowledge. Television has stopped being the terror of apocalyptic scenarios, has become the linguistic filter between two worlds, the real and the fiction, with the possible incursion of one into the other and vice versa. Similarly, a humanity has entered the doors of television studios eager to recognize itself in that ethereal annulment that is the transmission. Going on air means being overwhelmed by the wave. Like a surfer the television subject that falls (wape out!) under the mass of water that yearns to ride, then lets roll so, as a television character. Personal history and cathodic flow are mixed in a bubbling of pixels, following a cyclical course capable of nullifying the biologically different and well-defined in its separateness in the background of life. This flow is no longer a "show", as it was originally, no longer flows separated from the world but flows into the world rather in some cases "it is the world". Alessio Carosi found those who had to deal with the cathodic flux at the time of the dive, with the question "what did you feel the first time you were on television". They are people from the television world or exceptional frequenters, participants in competitions and quizzes and screen professionals but all reported at the time of the transition from the "real" world to the "real" world of TV. The projection takes place in front of the black cube in which Alessio Carosi, immovable performer, looks from an opening that, just think, looks like a television screen.From inside his Television, Carosi looks at the images that flow outside, It also looks at us who look at it in our turn and wonder who of the two, we or he, is actually in the media stream. Carosi exposed the cube in 1999 in a collective and I saw the scene of the man in the cube as if I were witnessing a dramatic appeal to reflect on the dematerialization of the image of the world, an enghio - vision that mocks the TV - vision, the idea - I wrote then - of living something that happens at a distance is reversed and is the verification that what happens takes place in here and now absolutely ineqiuivocabile. His fixity and his body language raised the narrow scope of that minimal sculpture as a symbol of an existence passed in front of the video, a champion of a humanity that has forgotten to look inside or through and prefers to look towards. The direction is that of a reassuring and familiar model, a classic from which not to take away the eyes and the mind, a paradigmatic argument on which to rest the entire existence of a day. Reflections of life and renewed participation in an enlarged group are the data objectively found in the formulation of the schedule as well as the multiplication of the television goal in contemporary teleology is equally evident. Carosi’s television is taken at the entrance, at the beginning, witnessed by a compact coexistence of question and recording of the answer in an image that is both commentary and instant photography at the same time. Without escape, the interviewed subject is captured again by the camera to speak, this time, of the television not "on" television. It defines the distance necessary to objectify the artistic operation that needs isolation from the background noise of everyday life. Although extraordinary, the story of the interviewees enters a sort of record of opinions marked by the detachments of the figure of man in the cube, this to emphasize the spatial condition that the performance makes active and that the installation, Once the cube remains uninhabited, it makes it emblematic. The confrontation of the champion observer, in turn observed, is a game of mirrors. The sense of being inside the box is that of recognizing oneself as a seeing unit that is placed in an area artificially separated from the world, in a simple but exemplary optical instrument that "makes the noise" on television. Ironically, Carosi behaves like a child who builds his screen from which, as from a small theatre, he looks out to imitate those who "are on television". All this is charged with a meaning since a mute dialogue is established between the fake television of Carosi and the real but invisible one of which the people interviewed speak, as to determine two imaginary moments: one simulated, the other narrated. Between the word and the simulation of the art the public is inserted that is in a middle position between the face recognized between the people that has been able to see in the homologating and familiar television of house and the disturbing static presence of the cube and its inhabitant, in the extraordinary position of permanent distraction from the electronic flow friend towards a disturbing connection with the real. Already Mario Schifano, at the end of the sixties, is confronted with the images of television on which he intervenes almost to accelerate the emotional carry up to a conjunction with the personal and personalizing demon of the artist who looks and modifies a common message. Up to Christian Jankowski who at the Venice Biennale in 1999 transmitted his dialogues with the canvases - fortune tellers. Fiction and reality are grafted to form a single contemporary building that does not exploit their substantial opposition but, on the contrary, a common ideological matrix that abolishes differences, both the one and the other have, in fact, the purpose of communicating their presence through the broadest possible dissemination and, above all, in that area of consensus that only television can guarantee. The TV appliance has become no longer the monster of false consciousness but the monster, that is, in a word, the "wonder" of the only possible consciousness, therefore real. I’m not here to give you the usual examples of the "live war" type, but it is sure that from the medialized experience you expect a cosmetic and de - naturalized image of the world and you are satisfied when you get it. At the same time, growth situations within antagonistic thinking have led to the identification of parallel channels of use of new technologies, an example is the birth of low - budget satellite televisions such as Global TV and Indymendia that compete and not in sterile antagonism with official programming, which means that television does not have a sense solely pervasive and massifying, but also informative and deviant from the common phrase. Carosi’s installation and action I hope will open in the Roman artistic reality a line of commitment and content weakly expired in easy hedonism and repetitive narratives. The image of the man in the cube, of the artist in the window, on television, in fact is a call to the experience of the fruition of the most lively part of art an invitation to be there and not to spare the meetings.

Between accidentally and programming.

From the outset, Carosi felt the importance of the accidental factor, an unforeseen variant of a condition outlined at the outset and designed for eventual development. The work is, therefore, a perfect connection between a manually elaborated objectivity and a coincident subjectivity, sometimes deviating from the message started in the first phase, however consistent with the corpus of the finished work; I explain: at the exhibition Grow Up, Young Carosi presents a machine that revolves around the subject in order to produce an image of it at three hundred and sixty degrees. The machine, built entirely by the artist, is the preordained part of the work, the "thing" ready to receive the accidental reality that goes to capture. This collision with the real is also evident in the exhibition Assenza e Desiderio at the Sala Almadiani in Viterbo. Direct prior of the work that we present here at the Salon Privé Visual Arts, the Carosi in the cube of 1999 looks and is looked at in turn, firm witness to a reality that flows integrates itself in the work, is seen as the unique body of visual plastic space is a piece of the work; but as a human component he sees and grasps the variants of that human theater that flows before, beyond the screen. The work presented at Obliterazioni is more subtle. A castle of "cards", consisting of eight white window shades, is marked black, What is this? Is it a simple metaphor of precarious equilibrium or is it something else? Of course, it is something else! If the observer moves and reaches a particular point of view he sees the figure of a girl on the back that faces the window, a human body that looks (think a bit) through the passage to which, Maybe those very axes were stolen. The displacement of the observer makes the vision not imposed but "happen" almost accidentally and is discovered as the beginning of an interpretative path. Carosi played on the pop icon of the rotogravure model to make more appealing the precarious building of the language of art and so he did also at the exhibition Post Arte Arte presenting a glass door painted with the image of Uncle Sam indicating his I Want You. The eleven September has just passed and the world is preparing to divide waiting for the American reaction that would have materialised with the war in Afghanistan; The icon of the call to arms stands black on the glass of a white door put on the flag in a room of Palazzo Calabresi in Viterbo as if to invite the viewer to place themselves on one side or the other of that space so divided. In truth, both on the one hand and on the other, we see in transparency the world and the painted figure appears to us a phantasmatic silouette, but it is present and although suspended in the fragility of the glass, looms with the question "which side are you on?". Here too the observer is called to re - compose the work indeed, to tell the truth, it is he who completes it from its position. With Dolce Vita , finally, we are faced with a funny Dadaist reworking of the famous film by Federico Fellini, Carosi transmits his video Dolce Vita which consists in the shooting of a cascade of honey dripping on four slices of bread that writes the word "life". The deafening sound of the shower of liquid evokes a fountain: it is the famous scene of the Trevi Fountain to occupy the space in front of the video with an actress dressed exactly like Anita Ekber who invites the audience to dance with her. From this "intermediate" work Carosi elaborated the shift from the video image to the performance in a conceptual pendulum that goes from simulated reality to organized reality in action and in things, two spaces practiced by the gaze and considered in the fragrance of their sharing and emotional interpenetration.