Mirko Aretini, a new star rises in the firmament of the Ticino art scene.
There’s no doubt about it: the young artist Mirko Aretini (1984) is the brightest new star rising in the firmament of the art scene in Ticino today. He belongs to that post-technological generation that has shaken off the isms and the ideologies, but that historical inevitability has made part of what we usually call a “virtual” tribe, whose methods of interacting and social sharing manage to make their way through the barriers of the system and the filters of technology. The prodigal and illegitimate son of a techno-TV organism and society, he points out that “being what you watch” has – generally speaking – become the mechanism used as its means of reaction by a public that feels inhibited by and in the world of images. This young Italo-Swiss artist uses the video medium in a way that can no longer be described as multimodal. He does away with the barriers of style and of labels between video artist, filmmaker and documentary director, adopting other forms of expression, such as those of the storywriter, the scriptwriter etc., aware as he is that images preserve and exert an absolute, occult power over people, just as, at the same time, he sets out to restore an almost propaedeutic meaning to the medium itself, in which the artist goes back to playing the part of the active actor in his vision of the world. If the universe of television and imagery that invades our senses every day through the mass media has rendered man so worryingly passive as to transform him into a “product” of and for consumption, jumping skilfully on the bandwagon of his reactivity, Aretini, irreverent as he is, uses an only apparently impersonal and detached lexicon no less skilfully to recuperate the concept of transmediality and backtrack towards a cognitive responsibility and awareness on the part of the individual. He is subtle as he coaxes emotions and concepts to the surface, conveys the unspoken meaning, displays the invisible. Any means of communication via a machine or the world of computerised telecommunications itself influence the meanings of collective participation. They mutate in the progressive process of critical emancipation from more or less obligatory ideological concord. Compared to the generation of 1968 or the one that followed it, the virtual world – just lately blogs and chats – has certainly contributed to giving different meanings to individual opinions, including those who seek to be seen and heard.

Mirko Aretini is an artist of intelligence for his ability to have grasped the fact that contemporary man is a surrogate of a world obsessed with communications, “being unconsciously and unequivocally what he sees and what he has seen”, i.e. the exact mechanism of submission to the cathode ray tube that the post-war consumer society wanted to impose on everyone as the model of control and subjection… and that today’s younger generations have now been questioning for several years. The age of enlightenment, expressed by codes of de-spiritualisation taking place from the bourgeois revolution to the present day, is – maybe fortunately – about to end, restoring substance to a humanism that may also be less egalitarian. Aretini uses internal beauty and external beauty, the chemistry of imagery and artistic eros.

There is space for manoeuvre, for the post-technological society that coined the slogan “everything has already been invented”, in man’s return to mankind and to values he has often ignored behind a screen of avant-gardist ideology as old as it is deleterious.

Mario Casanova_2010 (extract from Mario Casanova, Intimacy and Desecration, 2010, translated by Pete Kercher)

March 11th 2010 <