Marco Pietracupa: The Vacuum Decay

The barn of the artist’s house, forcibly converted into a photographic set, transforms into a cosmogonic observatory where the decay of the void functions as the activator for a cycle of portraits of his family and close relatives with whom he was ineluctably living with. The faceless bodies, shot before a cinematic green screen, lie waiting for the ultimate event, decaying as a generative mass of the vacuum that will annihilate them.

Pietracupa’s images, alternating inert bodies and now useless objects agglomerations, represent the actual realization of the multiple statuses of being. They are emancipation of the macabre dreading the instability of our vacuum. Bodies and things are abducted from the logic of disappearance and forced to a grueling eve. Although in different schools of religious thought the body represents an element only suitable for mortification through often repulsive and painful experiences, in The Vacuum Decay it rests in the space and persists in it only as an object traveling across it and passing through it. Being aware of the multiple times you have lived your youth, accounts for Pietracupa as an extension of your dismay.

The use of a green screen appears as a device allowing the annoying effect of fringing or colour spill (an imperfect crop of the margins of a subject) to creep in between the images. The technique, developed to insert the action in scenes and landscapes filmed somewhere else recreating an objective reality, embodies for the artist the unprovability of the external world. According to Pietracupa, reality is a false entity: it does not actually exist and is only presumed in order to be able to deduce the truth. This accidental irruption is the uncanny element interrupting the train of thought. It is the object that always takes the subject by surprise and hurls it beyond the limits of representation, down into the depths of the black space.

The disposition of the life-size bodies, articulated in the exhibition spaces, becomes in Pietracupa’s vision a vault capable of retaining all of his anguish. If finding oneself means measuring the volume of loss, relief from fear is rather the paradox of losing something you never owned.