Special project #01. Cristian Rizzuti

Can you still have a break to enjoy?

by AntonelloTolve

«Pleasure’s expectation is pleasure itself».
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

The arrival of aesthetic categories related to electrology civilization has produced in recent decades, a number of radical changes in the landscape of art and life that, on the one hand allow the internet user to navigate the seas and oceans of the interactive logons (possession has given way to access), on the other hand has created a failing breakdown in the public’s attention. A public – «a distracted spectator», according to Walter Benjamin – who, despite having acquired the gift of ubiquity¹, has lost the pause, the suspension, the stop, the stage, the delay, the gap, even its critical reflection of reality to advantage (to disadvantage?) of an economical speed that takes away the thought thinking. What is, then, the future of thinking in the computer age?² Which the space to enjoy the work within cyberspace? And which the time the viewer dedicate to an interactive project?

Starting from these considerations Cristian Rizzuti (Salerno, Italy 1986) in his work realized for ArShake’s banner, Oltre l’attesa/Beyond Waiting, invites the viewer to a temperature of the reading that interrupts the rapidity of interactive viewing to emphasize the need for a break (The break’s return is, in 1982, a special issue of the magazine «Taide»), an area of ​​respect – for art, for critics and the public – necessary to recover a lost interval «in terms of a break in the continuous flow of perception that we are involved»³, to search for an appropriate space of detachment from countless semiotic solicitations of which today is pervaded and invaded everyday life⁴. The artist seeks in this way to conceive a vital distance against that “hyper-availability to listen, to view, to receive in general […] messages totally or partially – or so equivocal – aesthetic» that solicit and corrupt, sometimes, the judgment’s authenticity. It is a design that wants to «regain the ability – or rather the consciousness- of a interstitial capacity»⁵ with the aim to encourage the viewer to a more human time. But also to invite him to think on interactive wait (his work begins “from the desire to inquire into a time of waiting which belongs to the user / observer), on the relationship between the individual and a monitor, turned the latter, into surface of work, blank page on which the work arises – between the rule and the case – in its processuality.

His program is then to transform the work in «incentive of an event (which is triggered in the observer’s mind)» (Sergio Lombardo), in the space environment in evolution, in the temporary area that offers “in its objectivity or in the user’s subjective perception “(Umberto Santucci). Indeed it is the real moment dedicated to the observation (apparently passive) of a chrono-image, to give birth according Cristian Rizzuti the work. An observation time (the focus is on the one who looks as Giulio Paolini would suggest) that becomes time of creation, revelation and at the same time, the basic reflection.

Every day for a month, users who access ArShake, are invited to observe some generative works (thirty banner, thirty images for thirty days), which during the break time, turn into icons, into environments that – subject to a previous process of deconstruction – create, through a chain of pixels (strokes of colour that the artist simulates in a semi-random process), some significant works of art.

Have a nice vision and good reflection!