BENNY CHIRCO NO SPACE FOR PARENTS

摘要

MTV and Aby Warburg; Gus Van Sant and Jean-Claude Van Damme; Winkelmann and Gilbert & George. These and many other assorted dichotomies constitute the variegated stock of cultural references from which Benny Chirco, a young artist born in Marsala and presently itinerant between Italy and the UK, cleverly selects the components with which to construct his work. He then remixes them with that slightly impudent intellectual autonomy that is typical of those (few) youngrnpeople who have also read and looked at the classics and who (even fewer) do not give way to nostalgia but instead dextrou-sly use that background of inherited images to interpret phenomena that are absolutely contemporary. So, just as in his conversation Chirco "copies and pastes" excerpts from the theories of German art historian Warburg - reread via Agamben - together with the anything but minimalist language of Bret Easton Ellis from Less than Zero - a cult novel about burned-out eighties' youth - in his art work he likes to use collage, both on a graphic and conceptual level.