A constant tension between ethics and aesthetics characterizes the poetics of Massimo Grimaldi (Taranto, 1974), whose works involve systematic collaboration with the humanitarian association EMERGENCY.
The In Uganda reportage, screened on the panels that resemble Apple devices, is the result of work carried out in early 2021 in the Children’s Surgical Hospital in the Ugandan city of Entebbe. As you scroll through the photographs of the hospital’s young patients and Ugandan landscapes, you realize that the documentary aspect takes second place to the affective component, which is dominant.
A selection of photos taken over the years in other EMERGENCY hospitals, in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and the Central African Republic, are displayed on the screens of the latest iPad Pros with a fade-in, hence the exhibition title. As critic Luca Cerizza points out, “the melancholy that relentlessly pervades Grimaldi’s work stems from the dichotomy—that the artist shows as never reconciled—between the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of art and, even more specifically in his case, from a sensual attraction towards a world of perfect, hyper-defined and mostly abstract forms and images, and the awareness that every work of art risks being crushed by a process of obsolescence whereby it is superseded—like any other product—by a subsequent linguistic proposal, by a new style, by the satisfaction, in short, of a new desire.”
at MAN, Nuoro
until April 13, 2023