Gregorio Samsa has been pushing art buttons for a while now in order to compose an aesthetic journey aimed at displaying and rediscovering the authentic content of a duplicate. Real / Virtual is the title of a double exposition (organized in Turin in 2011 for the Artissima Contemporary Art Fair) of a drawing that disconnects between real and that which isn’t real. Its evolution represents an imaginative index in which the concepts of plurality (of being plural singles in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy), otherness, grammaticalization, the division or multiplication of oneself, the repositioning and skidding of communication, sharing, multiculturalism and an apparent authorial loss (or decline) rouse a reflection upon the passion to recover the bud of human creativity – to repeat art’s footprints twice in two different places and to impress an environmental bi-polarity upon the project in a kind of connecting dislocation that goes from the «real» to the «defining» or from the material to the spiritual.
With this goal in mind, Gregorio Samsa has devised a pattern over the past three years that is entrusted to a mask, a symbol, a pretense and the confidential ceremony of the mirror to give rise to a series of duplications. Alberto Boatto suggests that «…Man is an imaginative animal that duplicates itself and processes doubles, whose invention and use of the mirror constitutes a sensitive manifestation on the level of utensil.» – useful for considering one’s body or ideas and identity as an object. It is also capable of generating flashes, appearances and epiphanies that are lost and consumed in extremely brief periods of time. Art exhibitions are presented like exemplary events, occasional performances or apparitions whose duration (1-3 days) is brought on in an illusory climate like a mirage that can only be reached by way of physical motion, the quest for places and a direct (or indirect) vision of things. Hungry Ghost and 1+1=1 designed for Rome follow this meditative path to invite the spectator to participate in a new dual level that leaves space wide open to expand and broaden in two unassigned places. In two areas of the city which are transversal in comparison with the art circuit and central in comparison with the life of the community.
«Eric» is yet again the bridge for Gregorio Samsa, the slow gangplank (Heidegger) that moulds a relationship between internal and external, the closed and open, indoors and outdoors or the artist’s idea and its coming into being. «Eric» is the idea coming into being – an oeuvre, an artistic entity, a creative product and an object that is embodied. It finds its own place in the area of life to manifest – through its corporality, the immaterial sphere of art: Gregorio Samsa’s thoughts.
