2004

"The project was born of four artists who decided to put together their specific competences in order to enact a crossing-over, and a union, between different art disciplines.

In “Many Artists” – the title already contains a highly pregnant pun between “many” and “mani” (italian for “hands”) – we experience a fusion between Filippo Armenise’s sculpture, Gabriella Cerritelli’s dance and Gaudio & Vacchetta’s costumes.

For many years, dancer Gabriella Cerritelli has been interested in the interaction between body, music, matter and place. Since the nineties, she has undertaken several projects concerned with the relationships between performance and live music, and with the interaction between different fields of art.

Filippo Armenise is a sculptor who, seeing the necessity of a compenetration of sculptural materials and natural organisms, leads his plastic exploration in the territory of the organic, thus materializing the cyborg imagery of “flesh and iron” through the creation of hybrid forms and bodies, casts of entangled hands and limbs, sculptural shapes and molds both charming and uncanny.

In this installation with performance Armenise’s sculpture transmutates into a dress (a creation by Elena Gaudio and Roberta Vacchetta) that comes to life through Gabriella Cerritelli’s dance. The sculpture representing an intricacy of hands metamorphoses into a dress and acquires a new dimension of transbaroque refinement. Thanks to the performing intervention of dance the dress/sculpture comes to life, a life of its own, as if in a propitiatory gesture, rythmical and light, which enriches all its perceptible aspects.

In “Many Artists” the wizard/artist Armenise gives life to his creations by means of Elena Gaudio’s and Roberta Vacchetta’s alchemy and Gabriella Cerritelli’s magic, presenting the necessity of the organic and the trasmutation of forms through movement. The result is a highly enjoyable, simple and straightforward intervention which – with no pretensions of citing it – evokes the myth of the Total Artwork that all artists cherish."

Dario Salani