Watching into Stars on Screens

Lusvardi Art is pleased to present “Watching into Stars on Screens”, Flavio Degen's first solo exhibition in Italy.

The title plays with the polysemy of the vocabulary “star”. The word is originally associated with those celestial bodies that shine in the sky. Referring to a human being, "star" is synonymous with both a famous and important person in the entertainment industry. The artist invites us to enter a reality, where screens are a bridge between us and stars, emblems of identity, reality and fiction.

In the work  “Life is the Medium, The Medium is Death”, the artist creates a throbbing cosmos. Televisions with faulty screens show looping videos in which abstract shapes expand, retract, grow and die like microorganisms, creating a living universe beyond the glass. The synchronization of these video shapes and the song “Ultralight Beam” by the star Kanye West expand in the perception of the viewer’s mind. 

Flavio Degen thus introduces us to the second potential meaning of the term star: well-known faces in the world of images.

In ‘Closed on every other sunday’ and ‘HIGH sobrevivir’’, we find ourselves in a cosmos dotted with famous people. At first glance we recognize these very popular faces, personalities drawn from entertainment and politics; however, the feeling of familiarity is every now and then distorted, creating a sense of uncertainty about the identity of who we observe.

The artist achieves these alienating effects by manipulating or overlapping different beings. Sometimes the outcome is a grotesque mask and sometimes a new creature, a hybrid of celebrities. Famous characters are accompanied by ordinary people who often appear in clips of videos which have a variety of subjects such as: violence, recreational activities, DIY- tutorials. It is further defined by adding frames of animals, robots, machines and nature.

Degen, by taking possessions of images, continues the dialogue of the artistic avant-garde of the 60s and 70s and further developed by a group of artists known as  “Pictures Generation” who were making  appropriation not only a formal choice, but also the content of the work. As a matter of fact, in addition to the use of mass-produced images, some Picture Artists would use photos of notorious artists' work of art to create new meanings and cast doubt upon the notion of authorship. In this sense, Degen highlights how the concept of originality is no longer part of the discussion, seeing as how in each video alone, who is filming is often unknown, emphasizing the absence of the creator. Degen creates an assemblage beyond the screen which is a universe consisting of a content of which we don’t know neither the origin nor the creator and when it was produced. 

Along with authorship, a generation of artists born in the sixties who had grown up along the consumerism of society where the obsession with images was growing, analyzed entertainment and highlighted its traits: information, advertising, art and violence. If in those years, characterized by analogue methodology, boundaries between images appeared clearer, in the 21st century within the predominant digitalization, the use and spread of image is out of control, a continuous succession in which the edges appear blurred.

Degen highlights the confusing lines of demarcation between contents, by associating videos from diametrically opposed contexts, that linked to each other, seem to reveal a synchrony, bringing to attention concepts of subjective perception, flattening of contents and contradiction.

The artist accompanies the intensive use of internet images to real material objects. Together they constitute installations.

There are televisions retrieved with already broken glasses. New and brilliant objects in the recent past are now already worn out and ready to be discarded, thus revealing the decadent facets within our century in the form of destroyed ready-made. 

Sheets become canvases onto which Degen projects his videos.

Chains, metal nets, clothes and pieces of asphalt are inserted into the installations, enriching their universe.

The Internet and objects interact with each other, in a symbiotic exchange in which one is necessary to the other.

The interdependence among corporeal and virtual cosmos is perceived not only in form but also in subject. In the video ResurfacingWayWithWordsEnd a video record shows the view beyond a windshield during a car journey in Philadelphia that depicts the Fentanyl/opioid crisis and glimpses of roads, streets and nature. The operation is similar in ‘Closed on every other sunday’, where the artist records an abandoned tomato field, a significant place of his childhood, added to images drawn from social media.

The documentation approach of the physical realm experienced by the artist along with Internet content strengthens this exchange between reality and virtuality in which both share being witnesses of this decade.

Degen faces this today’s reality at times with an ironic approach in as in ‘ResurfacingWayWithWordsEnd’ in which Jim Carrey's face seems to be the avatar of the artist who comments on the car journey, or like in the video work ‘Closed on every other Sunday’ with famous people created with AI, which in it’s output creates extreme images, to the verge of caricatures. 

Sometimes with a melancholic and disillusioned approach, conveyed through audio, which combines mainstream music songs with voice-overs, often manipulating and slowing down the sound which turns into echos and perceptive difficulty.

Unlike the first artists who in the 90s approached  the Internet with optimism for its potential and contents, now with artists like Degen you can find also its strangeness, unusualness and disenchantment.

Today's perception demonstrates a continuous blurring of identities and awareness between reality and fiction. Contemporary entertainment is a collage of images in which fame, the known and the unknown alternate and mix in a narrative of the new century made up of a regurgitation of images, where the content doesn't matter if it manages to entertain. Watching into Stars on Screens is an immersive journey into the interaction between reality and virtuality, an exploration in which the artist accompanies us to look at the stars, inviting us to pay attention to glimpse and see: the universe, the full or the empty, or perhaps something we haven't yet distinguished.