All Flesh Is Grass

ALL FLESH IS GRASS by Silvia Argiolas
curated by Domenico Russo
Silvia Argiolas immerges herself in soft tender lips, caught in the middle of their shiny ointed skin. Dipping graciously and blindfolded, she touches mouths which are wide-open and sour, with a smirk carved by countless occasional or even imagined bodily contacts. She takes everything she can from what has been lived, seen or felt, highlighting the futility of certain poses in order to show – or we might even say perceive – the original lack that lies beneath everything we do. She assigns to masked and frequently inebriated prostitutes the duty of initiating the rituals of our time so that the burden of truth can be delivered to those who are willing to accept it. The figures of her paintings carry beauty items which are true instruments of power for the construction of pleasure, devices for a careless treatment of the body and its disposal for the world to see. The artist?s manipulation of these fictions stems from a spiraling tension that expands from beneath our feet like an oil leak, creating a sense of uncertainty and depth concealed by the devilish, dreamlike and alluring sensuality of the scantily dressed ladies.
If you think attentively, of everything we lay our hands on, what is the most fake comes in handy solely in making ourselves the biggest lie we always strived to be. Words express fictions in the same way as the clothes we wear and the objects we buy, use and throw away. In that miniature sacred shrine which is our body, the temple of flesh, the promised land, the heavenly hope, all sorts of worthless rubbish and imbellishments flood in, wrapped and compressed garbage that is crammed to the point of bursting in a multitude of daring alternatives.
Quoting David Foster Wallace, in our skull-sized kingdoms there is only us and the freedom of our isolation, nothing else. The characters of All Flesh is Grass are the sovereigns of our consciousness, the queens of our obscene desires, which stand like Solomonic columns with no ceiling or sky above, in an outer-dimensional void filled by the carcasses of those who managed to survive this rat-race of pleasures. In the onanistic palace of our self-proclaimed empire, the only effective law is the one that imposes the ethics of enjoyment. The only purpose is to titillate the other?s desire, sometimes behind the disposable screen of a personal computer. With deep awareness Argiolas prepares the scene for erotic rites by placing a bed-altar and by gathering the most significant models in order to realize before others how intensely she is involved, or, it is the same, how much her body and her legs are compromised. Her poetry is so felt that without thinking she distances herself from expressions that are too easily impressive. For affection she moves away from useless forms, while acrylic surfaces polished by a sticky sexuality one can find in youporn amateur videos shake the recent social transformations in a grit portrayal of our darkest secrets.
There it is: a world of voluptuous dames with smiling hearts tattooed on their shaking posterior. Deceptive and sometimes even solemn, these women are continuously followed by an external dark presence and inviting everyone not to turn away from the global orgy. Everyone is thrown in this mix of emoticons covering orifices, star-shaped nippies, whips and bustiers, while the ordinary display of mundane and blatant emptiness timidly asks if really there is nothing more to see underneath the surface. For this reason still lifes are made of beer cans, cigarette butts, used tissues, chinese vases, projections of an ideal family where each element corresponds to a degree of kinship and at the same time to a degree of moral degradation. Here flesh is like drying grass, light years away from heavenly aspirations and from the divine root that the biblical origin of the title of the exhibition keeps away in a distant and feeble flame.