Solo Show

Estro Gallery, Padua-Italy 

Catalogue, 2000
 

Essay by BARBARA MARTUSCELLO
 

Stefano Cagol's art develops from his twin interest in the still image and the image in movement, or, rather, of the reciprocal reaction between photography and video. That which emerges most evidently in his latest work, and with even greater strength in the video Living in the Cities in North America, Entropia, Spider&Empire, is an alienating, vaguely disturbing, unfamiliar quality. This is revealed by peeling back the skin of the everyday and peering beneath the surface of the smallest most common things and actions. A spider weaving a web-captured using a zoom that absorbs certain tones and renders them synthetic (the acid green background in particular)-can induce a surprisingly captivating, trance-like effect. If slowed down and muffled, a child's cry can resemble a hoarse, animal-like sob and, when used as the soundtrack to a pleasant walk-through streets crowded with fruit stalls, shop windows, and bustling people-can transform it into a claustrophobic nightmare. A gargling throat can sound like a disconcerting, mutant machine. If the normal flow of traffic at a regular junction in a large city is sped up and the natural colors of the scene brightened, after the initially comic effect, little by little a more intriguing, dehumanizing element is revealed, the apparent banality of which is highly poetical (in a manner not dissimilar to Alfred Stieglitz's patiently photographed clouds). And the same can be said of Cagol's close-up images of an old gas stove, of the ascetic, out-of-tune, repetitive soundtrack to an over-made-up bimbo in a Turkish wig, of his silent video of two men in discussion, of the person lying on his back who seems to slowly wake up then get up, of his urban landscapes... Starting with the recognizability of images and their communicative impact, Cagol plays immediately on their decontextualization-and successive recontextualization-via doubling: the synthesis and repetition of the same image or a fragment of it. The result is a rhythmic beat and a highly-reduced associative structure that, acting as a sort of mantra, slowly strips away the excesses and tensions of habitual emotionality, thus paving the way for a possible new kind of interest in things Cagol's analytical approach stems from conceptual methodology that is, however, irredeemably compromised by the sounds, images, languages, and mechanisms of its own contaminated contemporary context-a context that hungrily perceives each of its elements as a possible present, as an open, continually evolving and metamorphosing possibility with infinite possible combinations.