RAIMAR STANGE. The young Italian multimedia artist Paolo Chiasera belongs to a generation grown up not only with computers, videogames and the Internet but also with mobile phones, cameras and digital photography. No wonder why the supposed limits between reality and virtuality and between actual and registered time no longer play a significant part in his works. Paolo Chiasera realizes instead artificial and real sceneries, whose different represented worlds mingle like a Moebius strip. Paolo runs Paolo Chiasera s artistic strategy Architecture and time, narration and movement, stories told by art and videos represent the main issues in Paolo Chiasera s artistic production until now. This young Italian artist always works with multimedia, and he particularly likes to oppose or bring together different genres such as (self-reflecting) video art, sculpture, performance and (site-specific) installations, often at the same time. The following example will help to understand this aesthetic strategy that at first glance would look like a typical postmodern one. Dance the loop! Everybody knows it the painting <Las Meninas> von Velazquez. Already the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his work <The order of things> considered this representation a good starting point to analize the relationship between painter, subject and observer. Paolo Chiasera resumes this discussion in his own particular way, putting a mat representing <Las Meninas> in a classic white cube on the floor. On the mat, a breakdancer in white dances rotating on his head to a strong rhythmical music. The artist shows the event on a small monitor as a continuous loop. The apparently breakneck performance creates a fascinating dialogue with the visual art icon, reduced to a piece of furniture, and with our (idealised) conception of the painting, belonging to the inventory of our <imaginary museum> (Andre Malraux). With the video <Breaking>, 2002, Paolo Chiasera shows different aspects of his artistic approach through a single significant image: movement, space and history create a contradictory but cohesive trinity. Time game! With the breakdancer s issue Paolo Chiasera gives a contribution to the debate about time that has been taking place in pop culture at least since the early eighties. Hip-hop music is characterised by a new idea of time that, like in rap and techno music, is not a continuous development but rather a recurring process: quotations, repetitions and uniformity create a texture where time is convoluted, almost permanent, as if it had no beginning and no end. The sampling, i.e. the new combination of some portions of already existing music, replaces original compositions; in this way common people can now become producers, even if they had always been pure consumers with a passive participation in cultural life. Paolo Chiasera s breakdancer, who quitted the riotous Bronx streets and entered the quiet fields of figurative arts, submits to this new time conception, since he doesn t want to stop his dance and refuses to stand astonished in front of Velazquez s painting. He chooses to play an active part in the action, although his eyes are continuously staring at <Las Meninas> due to his peculiar position. He runs, and runs, and runs: In the video <The Wall>, 2002, the artist appears in his own video striding along a street wall but, despite his movements, it seems he can t move forward. Paul Virilio described this state very effectively as <mobility in standstill>. In the wall decorated with graffiti a recurring element taken from the hiphop culture Paolo Chiasera inserted a small <time-window>, where you can see different De Chirico s paintings modified by the computer. In this way, the artist can merge different architectural representations. Last but not least, the screen is divided in two: the event is shown on two symmetrical panels as if the artist was running into his own arms. In this work, conflicting space-time dimensions come together again: the street outside and the paintings to be seen inside; the running as a current event and De Chirico s history; the personal exhausting experience and the very traditional and still knowledge of art history. The image of the running artist clearly an allusion to the successful German movie <Lola runs>, can be found as well in the following video description. Go on! A typical prefabricated building in (East) Berlin, long corridors in a yellowish light, where the artist is running. He is frantically trying to come from one floor to the other. Hard techno-music, quick cuts and a flashing light emphasize the artistic character of the video <20' livello>, 2001. The runner s movements suddenly stop, then slow down, and finally are shown again in real time. Paolo Chiasera seems to be a videogame protagonist in the flesh who has to go through as many levels as possible. Suddenly a change: the artist and his double are being filmed from above in a bright room. One circles the other, who is spinning very fast on himself almost blurring. Then a cut again and a skip to the next scene; here Paolo Chiasera is sitting in an almost empty room, with a classical painting hanging on the wall. Last cut: with the help of an image processing software, the artist is
sitting now in the middle of the painting. The (video-)image implodes with elegance in the (represented) image, both the observer and the videomaker cannot distinguish the inside and the outside anymore. Popmodern Paolo Chiasera s work now it s become clear - is not a postmodern one, because it deals with issues that are not typically postmodern such as the void, the boredom and the fake. Besides, the artist employs with relish all the modern technologies to point out our position in the world, whose reality is both created by the media and concretely experienced. The conflict between virtuality and reality, common sense and artistic fascination are not hidden from the view of Western opulence. Instead, it is clearly exhibited, thanks to this young Italian artist s critical approach.
caption: Time is an element that brings me back to timelessness (PC)