Valentina Artone at Acappella

The pictorial research of Valentina Artone (Giulianova, 1999) develops according to the process of framing. As a non-separable element and completely dependent on the base, the frame generates an inseparable unification between pictorial representation and support. The structure of the edges comes from wooden formwork used for the creation of bas-reliefs. The images opened within these margins evoke a desire for plasticity that is completely exhausted during the pictorial process: the subjects live in the representations as reminiscences of iconographic motifs belonging to an indefinite and unreal antiquity. The hybrid creatures depicted structure the imagination on the theme of falsification, the preciousness of the pictorial work and the supports emulates an archeology that is as fictitious as it is likely remote.

For the series of subjects on display, the artist was inspired by Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, a work also known as The Golden Ass, written in the 2nd century AD. The story takes place in Thessaly, land of witches and spells. Lucio, the narrator and protagonist, has an insatiable curiosity to see and practice magic. After rubbing himself with a magical ointment, he accidentally transforms into a donkey and, despite retaining human feelings, lives an intense life experience between kidnappings, long adventures and repertoires of stories. In the end, the discovery of the original appearance coincides with a new self- awareness. This reading, as a process of imaginative interpretation, takes the form of descriptive drawings and notes of magical formulas and singular bodily transformations. Parallel to the interpretative phase, the artist deals with the translations of the key words dating back to the narrative in images constructed through textual input (prompts), by means of Artificial Intelligence Dall-E 3. The subject evoked in painting is therefore the result of coincidence of the mentally generated image with its generative double. Paradoxically, during this process randomness is decisive, the translation of the input into representation focuses on its very unpredictability: what is artificially generated is often made up of an intricate and complex sum of unlikely elements, which present distortions and alterations of a -logical and grotesque, sometimes ironic. The work therefore focuses on the selection of forms to be traced back to painting, based on the inconsistency that – on the one hand the imagination, on the other a developing software – manipulates the signs as pertinent to reality. In a similar way, the stories and fables of the Metamorphoses plot a reality suspended between the dreamlike and the mythological, which is expressed in figurations full of mystery, ritual and magic, transformations and mixtures, sometimes disharmonious, of elements of different nature .