If artists have the capacity to reveal the truth, it is through their inventions and transformations. In a world that we perceive more and more as image, reality as an idea has become inseparable from its omnipresent representations.
Pippo Lionni reflects on this state of things, on this endless slippery game of substitutions. His realm is the language of industrial symbols. As icons, humanity is reduced to abstraction : computer icons, digital codes and road signs... In reaction to the standardization of visual messages, he acts as a "sampler" to produce new trajectories for symbolization that determine the modality of our contemporary lives. Through quotation, association, opposition, recuperation, and never ever being satisfied with a unique interpretation, he plays the
attraction and repulsion enacted by the "empire des signes". He appropriates a language - while at the same time reinventing it - based on logic of complexity and contradiction. He amplifies or hybridizes the symbols while emptying them of their immediate functionality.
His work could be described as minimalist or conceptual, if there didn't persist a narrative level, literary and critical, a "content" which completes and superposes in a particular way the technique employed. Pippo Lionni fully assumes the role of the artist as storyteller and contrasts the attitude of some of his contemporaries for whom art is a perfect and autonomous object. His work is as many enigmas to reestablish the meaning of image. Reassessing, questioning, wrong tracks, dead ends, are the means. Upside down flying men, toppling chairs,
a hand on fire - all the laws of nature and the earth's attraction are broken. The objective is not to question the loose of meaning or purpose in our lives, but rather to reveal the obscurity that prevents us from seeing the truths in front of our eyes.
For him the aim is not to represent but to reorganize the world, and to discover new angles of approach. His pictograms illustrate, often with humor sometimes with violence, what speech could only assess, limit, soften. If the first volume of "Facts of life" establishes the bases of his artistic vocabulary, the second proved the efficiency of his system. The third "Facts of life" shows how the artist's language has become affirmative and his attitude radical. Tackling more complex themes, pictograms are as many slogans, furtive signs, urges, desires or repression.
He acts more and more as an activist in the image war. His latest works, shown at the Galerie Frédéric Giroux, in the exhibition "Primetime" in June 2002, questions in a frontal and brutal way the perverted effects of standardization of media images. The recent pieces offer oppositions, constant gaps between the signifier and the significant, fiction and reality. Thus setting out to highlight in a critical and incisive way this "ambiguous period of social communication history on the so-called generalization where media circulation of ideas and
opinions, generally conceals the worst manipulations and underground existence of directive speeches."*
On one exhibition wall "Primetime - Fuck me" is the image of a family, lazing at the dinner table, watching animated images of a couple making love on the tube. The same device is used in "Primetime - Kill me", but this time, it is the couple making love who watches a man being stabbed. Our relation to reality is endlessly disrupted by the reversibility of visual exchanges.
The work titled "Rape" symbolizes a woman whose body bears handprints. If the title were not so explicit, how would we interpret it? The hand is also a symbol for peace, the means of a caress? In "The name of God 1 and 2", the attacker is at the same time the aggressed. The artist likes to foil ready-made codes and reminds us of the plurality of meaning... titles and symbols rebounding off each other creating new connotations.
The book is a supplementary element that serves to weave meaning through installations. "Primetime" and "Facts of Life 3" show the changing complexity of an artist who, moving from one support to an other, wants to shake up the world so as to draw a map of desire, to diversify identities and to increase aesthetic and existential interactions.
Whatever the medium: book, photography, installation, video... His work acts upon our faculty of representation in endless pursuit of analogy and of connection, but also upon our mental, physical and spatial perception. They explore our most intimate dimensions of the human psyche, the notions of impulses, and claim reversibility between horror and ecstasy, between violence and eroticism.
Rooted in his critical vision of reality, he accentuates, plays with and reveals hidden meaning. As such, the artistic product becomes a liberator. He ironically denounces intolerable social situations, narrow thinking and hypocrisy through the use of eloquent metaphors about any form of arbitrary conditioning which regulate our lives. "Facts of life" insists on the inefficiency and inaptitude of existing systems to discern the elusive "essence of existence ". Their portrayal of the human condition is scathing but not without humor.
Pippo Lionni reminds us that if art is a dispenser of
emotions it is not least language and thought.
Samantha Barroero, Paris, May 30th 2002
* Paul Ardenne in "l'image corps, figures de l'humain dans l'art du XXe siècle", Ed. du Regard, Paris, 2001.
