“Dialogue Pistol” by Francesco Tortorella
Review by Claudio Komarek
Words hurt more than guns, thought Francesco Tortorella creating this intriguing, funny, and direct work, as always in his style.
When I see Tortorella's works, I always think of hundreds of frames from great films that somehow got stuck somewhere in my brain, memorable scenes, posters, and that is what Dialogue Pistol evokes first and foremost. A poster for a movie that was never made, a portrait of a scene that was never shot, a dialogue from a script that was never written.
But let's talk about poetry, because when there is true art there is always poetry, and everything else, such as style, technique, staging, quotation, concept, become totally secondary; poetry we said... Tortorella develops his own poetics through a portentous recourse to the noble and assiduous use of the theme of imperfection, and what is more imperfect than humans and human relationships? Love, hatred, affection, rancor, revenge, gratitude, are a great web that connects us to each other, we are used to thinking of love as a pure feeling that has to do with an ideal emotional state, hatred itself is often idealized as a pure feeling. The truth is that we wallow in a swamp of everyday moods in which everything blurs into one another and our acting and feeling become jagged and very often nebulous. The journey into the cruel inspection of our intimacy thus becomes for Tortorella a central expressive figure as well as a recurring stylistic theme.
Imperfection we were saying, like that brutal, rough, murderous stroke with which the artist draws his compositions, an anti-aesthetizing search for a rough anti-idealized imagery, a gestural force that becomes an honest language of a vicious and sanguine world. We live in a society that offers us glossy visual models, rock stars with glittering tattoos, females with plastic profiles, males with glowing white teeth ... even in pornography we are submerged by images of perfect bodies or at least perfectly imperfect ones. But our life is made of something else, it is an unresolved sequence of variations on unknown themes, it is made of hairy bodies that often interact clumsily in often awkward situations.
Then here is where the poetics of imperfection becomes a search for the intimate essence of everyday relational gesture, a primitive analysis of our imperfect primal essence, this is what distances us from divinity and the mass media parasite, our being different, unique, dirty, unpredictable, human.
It is often said that the greatest masterpieces in the history of art are deliberately unresolved, think of Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and how important the "unspoken" is compared to the obvious, the implicit compared to the explicit, because art is first and foremost the immediate and unconscious telling of what is unseen, and the artist, shamanically, makes a connection with it for us. There is so much, in Tortorella's works, of the unspoken, of the unexposed, of the unshown; the artist mockingly always gives us a small snippet of a larger picture, a glimpse into a larger world, a suggestion of a deeper feeling, so that it is our unconscious that does the rest, that connects the dots.
In this great comic strip of our everyday, we scroll through the bittersweet images of our existence, the catch of being born pretty and immortal only to perish dirty and corrupt, like our biology. But man is this stuff here, an eternal story of imperfection, handed down by the deities who watch us amused.