Insane splinters of an incomprehensible reality. Whatever the opinions may be about art today a difficulty emerges when one tries to comprehend what is the right thing to do. Genres, styles, tenendencies and movements no longer exist,the enthusiasm for new media and technology has subsided, and everything seems to wander desperately between Existence and Nothingness. Contemporary art reflects the visible, but no longer chases the invisible, having lost that component of utopic pursuit that made it exclusive.

Beneath the surface, nothingness, proclaimed Andy Warhol, identifying one of the intrinsic characteristics of a system based exclusively on the absolute desire to ‘exhibit’, almost as if existence can justify itself by trying to externalize the present and halt the fleeting moment.

True or false, artifice and reality are nothing but the same sides of a coin in a remix of form and content where research no longer passes through the absolute but the relative.

From this viewpoint it is clear that everything rotates around chaos, which is considered a primary component of a continually transforming reality.
But despite the Big Bang nothing can be seen except a new generative from which existence is progressively subtracted.
If this is the dominant way of thinking, there is someone who makes an exception, convinced that art does not have to become a neurosis victim in a vain desire, albeit naive, to please.

Bruto Pomodoro can be placed in this category of ‘outsider’, who contrary to many of his generation, pursues a formal order, choosing to take a path that is completely individual, that could coincide with an organic abstraction. An abstraction however that does not refer to himself but coincides with Teo Van Doesburg’s definition: “there is nothing in more concrete and real than a line, a colour belonging to a project.”

The fluctuating and magma like material becomes a living entity, a physical and unsettled presence, not without symbolic connotations in an area of experience where a sign becomes a presence or apparition.

Bruto notes: “My only intention is to make manifest the infinite morphological potential of life, through its archetypal values, these symbols repeats themselves continuously in my works.” Based on his experience as an artist and biologist Bruto approaches the Algenic Codes without prejudice alongside the central questions about our existence, and also the issues of reproduction of human life through manipulation and the programming of genetic material.

Essentially Bruto addresses life’s secrets in an exhibition where art and science are fused together in a balanced relationship.

Contemporary art has been obsessed by the PostHuman, the cyborg, (a man half man half machine) and genetic manipulation for some time, and it has become a sort of romantic Frankenstein that utilizes the most spectacular elements of scientific research to create the cybernetic man able to deny his own existence.

Instead Bruto walks parallel to science searching for a ‘primigenia’ identity that goes beyond the divide between ‘ars’ and ‘scientia’. His maze like works pursue the forms of the future through traces of memory, so much so that DNA fluctuates like the ocean waves or become traces of an ancient primordial civilization.

Bruto pursues the secret of mankind and it is not a coincidence that his Algenic Codes were featured at this years Noir Festival (2002) in the themed section ‘Secrets’.

So here, Bruto, as a good detective, makes the invisible visible helping us to enter in contact with the intimate and unknown sphere of our being.

But we are not in the realms of science fiction, but rather science. “The rise of a new era has come”, proclaims Bruto with the same tone the futurists used at the beginning of the century in their manifesto’s.

In fact, his works have an ethical and philosophical merit by researching that alien that is part of us. It is no longer a foreign body but an intrinsic alteration of oneself in a continuous doubling image, that can be witnessed in the gut of his abstract works in the pictorical monitor built by Bruto .

There dance primigenie forms mirroring each other in a duet of transitory images in continuous movement.

If the Algenia leads to the construction of the perfect individual, observing Bruto’s works brings to mind the words of Max Born: “Progress, in physics, has always passed from intuition to abstraction.

There is no doubt in fact that Bruto has succeeded in transforming the scientific principal into a pictorial principal manipulating the codes of two sciences and building a separate aesthetic universe characterized by the absolute desire of self-consciousness. Bruto has the capacity to modify the relationship between the elements by developing his own narrative in which the aliens are part of us.

The secret isn’t searched for elsewhere. it lives with us, and William Gibson knows this well, he began his novel “Count Zero” with the surgical reconstruction of his main characters mauled by an explosion:

“…The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn’t made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.

It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green…

…And one morning he woke in a strange bed, the Dutchman standing beside a window spilling tropical green and a sunlight that hurt his eyes. “You can go home now, Turner. We’re done with you. You’re as good as new.”…

Algenic Codes exactly…

 

Alberto Fiz

From “Codici Algenici” Exhibition catalogue, Courmayeur 2002-2003