KEIN KÖRPER (No Body) is the title that Valter Luca Signorile (1965) has chosen for his first one-man show at the MACT/CACT, which follows up on several participations in thematic exhibitions in the same venue. KEIN KÖRPER also constitutes the synthesis between many of the topics on which this Piemontese artist has been working for years and which all contribute to piecing the overall dimension of his work together and putting it into context: i.e. superimposing his personal, internal and intimate involvement on his political and civic experience and consequently melding them together.

Signorile is part of the increasingly densely populated legion of artists who have never attended an art school or academy, shifting didactic criteria onto their personal interests and piecing their art together without being obliged to comply with a school of thought deriving from the academies, which these days is often actually counterproductive for those whose thinking takes place in the framework of an energetically statist and merely institutional political context, where an increasingly strict role is played by that aspect of culture that acts as a straitjacket, as regime-approved academism and as market preponderance.
 This relationship he nurtures with creativity, by its very nature based inevitably on symbolic and surreal expressiveness, generates works in which technique is forcefully – and fortunately – subjected to the artist’s existential dimension, almost as though his creative process were to derive from automatic internal magmatic forms and proceed to take on other more communicative shapes, somewhere between the subconscious and the world of the living.

While these genetic issues are not necessarily rooted in a chronology traceable to recent history, Signorile’s art nevertheless touches on expressionism, symbolism and symbology: on surrealism as a form of removal and as elements of philosophical abstraction.
These iconological issues and the artist’s interpretation of form provide a link to more savage anti-academic approaches: a non-scholastic artistic morphology, as well as a freedom of expression emancipated from all forms of induced culture. Liberating art, liberating ourselves and setting thought free from the bond with its form constitute a process that leads to radically subjective, almost anti-cultural physiognomies reminiscent of Body Art, Fluxus, Dada, Art Brut and other recent forms of Neo-Expressionism. We interpret these connotations, which we have often identified in young artists, but also in their more established peers, as the basis of a curatorial thinking that aims at studying non-culture or the phenomena of rebellion against the universality of the bourgeois and institutional Enlightenment.

Comparable cases assimilated by the concept of extra-ordinariness in considering a perfect creation, construed as the refined expression of an inner ontology, can be found not only in recent art history, where they are expressed by the liberating movements listed above, but also in classical times, when symbolism, mythology and the grotesque constituted motives of contrast with the reigning culture: these are issues that the human race has tackled over the centuries whenever it has got to grips with the confrontation between the vision and representation of impossible worlds, of the infinite with finite spaces and of inner rebellion.

KEIN KÖRPER stands for a thread of discourse between concept and representation, of the upheaval towards human abstraction, catharsis, where even the relationship between cause and effect is skilfully overturned by the artist, who uses this exhibition to present not so much a work to be developed room by room as a thematic experience.

JE SUIS PRÊT (2014), performance by and with Valter Luca Signorile, from the sunset of Saturday 29 November throughout the sunrise of Sunday 30 November 2014.

SE IL CORPO PERDE FORMA. Arte irregolare e annullamento del soggetto. La ricerca artistica in Valter Luca Signorile. Lecture (in Italian) by Giuseppe Carrubba. The artist will be present. Saturday 7th of February 2015 at 5.00 p.m.

Mario Casanova, 2014 [translation Pete Kercher]

Ph. Pier Giorgio De Pinto © PRO LITTERIS Zürich.