Rome Gallery Tours

Retrophuture | 20 Feb - 7 Apr 2012
extended to April 15

Retrophuture is a musical project/media with which Fabrizio Passarella presents for his new solo show at The Gallery Apart in the role of not only visual artist, but also a composer and poet.
Here you can take a look to entire project http://www.retrophuture.org/ 

The context in which the project develops Retrophuture includes the minimalism of Steve Reich, Terry Riley and La Monte Young, the decadent Berlin Trilogy Bowie, Eno's ambient sounds, the romance of John Foxx frozen, pop the first "mechanical" Gary Numan, the Krautrock and industrial mantra post-rileyani of Kraftwerk, the vagaries of oblique Steven Brown and Blaine Reiniger as well as hundreds of ephemeral groups flexi-synthpop unearthed on the internet.

Passarella also makes extensive use of illustrative material and propaganda in Germany and Russia of the thirties, without there being, of course, no locking ideological, though fully conscious of moving in a minefield faced with the irony necessary, detecting coincidences aesthetics of totalitarian regimes and the use of rhetoric as a poetic base (as in the monuments of the Stadio dei Marmi, or Kolkosiani, or refined in Riefenstahl's films) and extolling the heroism of the Titanic and the machine (taken from Bowie what was the anthem of the last fin de siècle), symbol of the drive for both reactionary and modernist to a hypothetical future bright.

Applied to music, it means a composition emerged as a surrealist automatic writing and fast, the result of full ownership of software that is easy to use music, maybe recreate analog sounds with a simple and ingenious program for Mac beginners; perfect means for a non- musician and an artist trained eye, functioning more as a kind of video editing or photoshop as a sheet music of traditional composition. Real-music or sound painting designs obtained by adding, subtracting, deleting, copying.

Parallel to music, Passarella has been working on the texts (very short metric, basic rhymes, visual language of the texts of the musicians mentioned first) and the images, creating a fee for each piece of music and visual poetry.

His interest, however, was not nostalgic for any operation or technological archeology, but reflect on the deeper meaning of the apparent final decline / decline / decay / breakdown / end (in a word, Untergang) in an historical period characterized by a combination of persistent romantic European heritage, the postwar industrialism and the omnipresence of technology today.

The power of the project lies in the lucid and ruthless Passarella evidence with which depicts the cultural and ideological stalemate that characterizes the season that the western world and Europe in particular are experiencing. The drift economistic interpretation which the formulas in vogue force the crisis, Passarella must give way to other categories of thought, from the history of men and ideas from which to draw inspiration for a possible future.

But the executive summary Retrophuture is the video, designed as a fast clip synthpop, with a soundtrack to the text of which reads significantly: Art is an old toy / bulky trash museum / We build in solitude / the beat of the crowd / We build sound sculptures / paintings intangible / monumental minimalism / conceptualisms mobile / detoxifying Visionary art / you can take anywhere / music in a small package / to stimulate the brain / Engineers We are (of music) electronic / Constructivist romantic / We designer (music) electronic / Retrofuturisti oxymoronic.

The historic video clips downloaded from the network core and filtered: among many, documentaries on the Maoist Red Guards, on Pimpf Hitler, choruses and dances of the Red Army, Carmen Miranda, Rudolph Valentino, tango dancers, a rare video on "Monument Third International "Tatlin, the" Lichtskhatedrale "from" Triumph des Willens "by Leni Riefenstahl, the urban utopias of Stalinist Russia and the new model of Speer's Berlin.

It is the actor Michael Rennie starring in "The Day the Earth Stood Still (The Day the Earth) in 1951, the archetype of the spirit of retro futuristic scientist manipulator of energy (which here is transformed into electronic sound), to resume the poetic robotics years 80, the jerking movements and stereotyped obtained with primal animation.

And now the exhibition in a box becomes visual exhibit of works in the gallery, mounted on aluminum pieces of the images created digitally in a fascinating black and white which gives emphasis to the atmosphere where deco, retro and futuristic pre-and postwar mix. A specially designed and created by the fanzine will complete the entire project.

The Gallery Apart
Via di Monserrato, 40
info@thegalleryapart.it