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MARCELLO SESTITO: STraVolti

MARCELLO SESTITO: StraVolti

Solo exhibition

April 4 to April 15, 2023

Stra-Volti

Our face is a mask, the curtain of a body, our identity from which we cannot escape, but we can disguise, deceive ourselves, always find new characters to disappear behind, or hide behind a perfect selfie.
Marcello Sestito is aware of the role play, he puts everything before our eyes, and all the people become characters, the masks make them more real than reality. He takes us back to an original identity, breaks down the wall of altered communication, distorts, without distorting, to reveal. He integrates fragmentary parts of himself under the same sky. Our deepest identity is built as it manifests itself. A face is defined through the relationship, faces multiplied to infinity, virtual evanescent faces that implore “look at me”. The women’s faces form a single face, which includes everything, pain and pleasure, glamor and mystery, giving shape to a linguistic cosmology where each of us is a world.
A sense of euphoria and vital leap animates all the portraits, crossed by a pop energy with tools of the digital present, destined to break through the barriers of language; they are the infinite selfies that tend to define and reaffirm being there, where there is a lack of “being”. The faces of Marcello Sestito have a gender identity, they are women. It is an apparently playful and playful feminine universe, but it is also a feminine that has a tribal value, it appears with the strength of one who unearths the hatchet, they are aggregating atoms with which the artist aims to displace the communication system, contrived, distorted and incorporated into a current feeling.
The glance is magnetized by the colour, by the lively signs that intercept different sign formulations. It is a biological and cultural energy that exudes wildness, beyond thought obedient to a logic in which identity risks being sucked into the system of social control. Each face is a discovery each face is a gift, a written text. It reminds us of our uniqueness, the inviolability of our deepest being. Each face is an architecture that triggers new visual and perceptive relationships and gives shape to the biological and structural chaos; individualities that want to emerge from the crowd, faces that escape the digital hallucination. The merchandise face, the selfie face, is not a fetish, but turns into a chimera. We need to give a face to these forces and Marcello Sestito does it, each face reaffirms that it is possible to navigate in a sea of data and algorithms without drowning, isolating ourselves from the background noise.
These faces are turned upside down because perhaps it is only through an upheaval, a disturbance that one becomes aware of the logic of surveillance, and the body is no longer a bargaining chip.
The face and the gaze now contradict each other, now they reunite, the self and the other, the self is another, the time and speed with which it manifests itself on the screen of a smart phone or on an ipad is a gesture provocative compared to the traditional means of painting, where error is not expected.
It is a landscape of signs that affect and distort the original, intimate readings that superimpose stories on stories. It is a frenzy of gazes that freely show themselves, looking at the beholder, a gallery of faces in which to mirror and recognize oneself. “Je est un autre”, said Baudelaire and it is precisely in this otherness and kaleidoscopic ambiguity that Marcello Sestito with his overturned faces, builds a human bridge between Narcissus and his reflected image of him.

Stephanie Carrozzini
28 December 2022

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