Body’s Contamination

"Body's Contamination" by Alessandro Risuleo has been presented for the first time during the last edition of MIA Photo Fair in Milan.
This project is a part of the author's research, lasting several years, on human body. Through the mixing of photography, arts and different types of expressive language, the author decides to show the human figure focusing only on some parts of the body.
These parts are "contaminated" with jagged and rough brushstrokes of paint to emphasize lines, overlapping of limbs and volumes.
This project shows the author's desire of breaking away from technique and contemporary vision, for which everything has to be standardized and extremely perfect. This choice is orientated at proposing another point of view: the key point of this work is not on the technique, but on the idea and on the message, two elements which become the real protagonists of the story, together with the evocative interpretation every observer is able to give.
So the author decides to use an additional element just to create a more intimate connection between the artwork and the spectator. Once you focus on them with a smartphone, Alessandro Risuleo's artworks come to life and become part of a screen animation thanks to augmented reality and to an App for Android and iOS, called "ARTScan" and specifically created - this App is downloadable on smartphones and other devices (https://itunes.apple.com/it/app/artscan/id725298941?mt=8 and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.visual.artscan&hl=it). These screen animations are able to show something other than what is visible with a naked eye. The spectator becomes a protagonist (click here to see how the App works: https://vimeo.com/160339974).
The aim of this stylistic choice is not to celebrate the new frontiers of our technology or to maximize an amazing or scenic effect; the purpose is to create an interaction among author, artwork and spectator, and also the real participation to the creative process by the observer.
The person who stands in front of a work of Alessandro Risuleo becomes an integral and essential part in its reading and interpretation, thanks to his sensations, his perceptions and his personal life-story.
With this kind of solution, everyone is able to interact in a direct and active way with an object that should be inanimate for its inner nature: photography. The choice to put together video and still image is an author's deliberate decision: he wants to give more and more space to spectator's creativity and freedom. In this way, the person becomes an active subject in the interpretation of action and an independent entity in its understanding.
"Body's Contamination" is in constant evolution and right now it consists in seven works (Little Doll, Reveal, Wait, Hug, Reverent, Escape, Affliction). These works are made with fine art printing quality and they are produced as unique pieces. Every work is certified and released in a strictly limited and signed number of copies. Printing is on Fuji Crystal DP II paper thanks to a laser photowriter Lambda Durst; the photographic processing is done by photochemical process.
Every work realized in this way is then mounted on a DIBOND aluminium board and sealed under extra brilliant acrylic glass to obtain more depth and expressive power.

“We can find a central theme, told in an obsessive way, inside Alessandro Risuleo’s works: the Body. A perfect body, a sort of prototype, an aesthetic model with established shape and proportions. This kind of body is, in some ways, comparable to the classic canon of the Human body. Alessandro Risuleo’s body is represented mostly in an abstract condition, rarely is placed in a real and recognized environment, his body is opulent, is always moving, is exposed to a light that is able to reinforce its absoluteness, a shape that is not an example of fragility.
Alessandro Risuleo uses other substances on this kind of absolute body: so the body pretends to be made by bronze or iron. Otherwise it pretends to be an ancient column made of the palest marble.
This body is made by “other” substances and forgets it’s made by flesh.
It alludes to a perfect system, midway between man and machine: the central idea is completely forget the body just to cancel the time that makes it relative.
In his last works, Alessandro Risuleo doesn’t seem able to find harmonic elements to be included in his bodies. They are no more solitary, they are described by hugs and contacts with other bodies, they bring traces of “other” contaminations on their skin.
Fragments of chromatic magma - of erupted substance, unreadable in its essence - contaminate the “first” Body, its pureness and its original perfection.
Maybe, these bodies tell us about our time and inability to the think the world as a perfect place.”
From “Il corpo contaminato” by Giancarla Frare, 2016.

Alessandro Risuleo, born in 1971, has already obtained many awards for his projects and his work has been the subject of numerous group and solo shows in Italy and throughout the world.
He took part recently to the 2015 and 2016 edition of MIA Photo Fair in Milan.

For further information: www.alessandrorisuleo.com