Unlike Wang Qingsong, Debora Vrizzi is virtually the only performer inside the scene as she mostly uses herself as filter between the viewer and the notions explored in each piece. A graduate of Rome Centro Sperimentale di Fotografia, this young Italian artist combines her activity as visual artist (performance, video, photography) to her work as director of photography for films. In Vrizzi’s work, the setting provides the background to a chameleonic role-play where parody restages myths, iconic characters, fairy-tales and motifs of 15th - 16th century iconography. There is a carnival dimension in her work that fascinates as it mocks stereotypes, questions the game of social identity and subverts the general accepted image.

In her project “Un-Happy Ending” (2007), the artist stages and interprets through photo and video the moment of death (often violent) of eight historical female characters: Lady Diana (1997), Francesca Woodman (1981), Mother Theresa (1997), Marie Antoinette (1793), Marilyn Monroe (1962), Mata Hari (1917), Nico (1988), Sissi (1898). Vrizzi represents them in a theatrical and pictorial way, carefully paying attention to costumes and lighting. Then she adjusts on the scene some elements that decode the psychology of the historical character and stand out as witty remarks. The dress of Marie Antoinette covers the background like a peacock tail. The bandage on her eyes shows the impossibility to see the crude facts. Marilyn’s lying on a single bed represents the woman’s intimate void and despair. These portraits are represented in the moment of transition from life to death, which coincides with the characters transformation into pop icons. Fascinated by the ambiguity and fairy tale format of news about these historical figures, the artist depicts them as princesses whose immortality passes through the unlucky circumstances of their deaths. The fatal moment coincides with the birth of a myth.

The narrative occurs in a moment of eternal suspension between a ‘before’ and a ‘after' - elliptical moments - and an eerie state on the border between death, dream and sleep enhanced by the sense of light, the voice over, the poses and the slow exploration by the camera. Such suspension and ambiguous dimension extends to the formal level with the work developing on the boundary between cinema/video/photography. The photographs in the project are not stills taken from video but (a choice consistent to her research) shots taken on the setting from different angles. Referring to the video piece, Bruno Di Marino argues that the eight portraits “on one hand are photographic portraits, en pose subjects; on the other hand they belong to the realm of images in movement” and that “on the borderline among pictorial, photographic and movie representation, Vrizzi seems to match the punctum temporis mentioned by Gombrich, that is the most meaningful instant of an event that the artist chooses to represent on the canvas as well as the punctum mentioned by Barthes in his essay Camera Lucida: ‘plus-value’ given by the viewer in front of a photograph. Different from what happens with watching movies, those who look at a photographic image have enough time to intervene and integrate with their own glance, to isolate a detail, adding in the end a ‘surplus’, something though that has always been inside the picture... Through this kind of three-dimensional moving frames, Vrizzi allows us to reflect in real time. She gives us all the time we need, exactly as we were in front of a photograph.” (Segno Cinema, May-June 2008). Her research on the opposite yet related concepts of stillness and motion continues in other works (Frame Line, 2008) exploring the formal and conceptual implications of cinematic frame.

Wang Qingsong and Debora Vrizzi will be present at the opening.