Barack 2008

Barack 2008 is one of the portraits of the series Ritratti that Matteo Peretti started in 2007 and it is certainly the one that better represent the curatorial idea proposed by Manon Slome. If we consider that this work of art was created just before the Nobel prize assigned to the new president Obama, the expectations expressed by this portrait are reinforced and publicly admitted.
Composed by sculptural installations, the portraits develop along the double track of a narrated and shrewd tale where the characters are minute toy-soldiers in a surreal battlefield that unveils power struggles, hopes, weaknesses, personal intrigues, disenchantment. Likeness and identity are at the base of the investigation that Peretti carries out on the symbolic nature of this cycle of works where the artist does not apply a somatic analysis of the individual described, insisting instead on the peculiarities of identity, on the syntactical structures of character and on the way he acts in the world. The person who is represented can thus be personified by a shape or an object that shows him through characteristics, ironic synchronies, psychological analogies that have been filtered with intelligence and causticity