Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Maria Letizia Bixio                                                                                                          09.2009

In early XXth century London there were artists who liked to make enormous chalk drawings on the pavements which skirted the lush boulevards beside public gardens, offering to nannies and children, for just one penny, the possibility to jump inside them with fantasy, in order to make some trips through unknown universes. But when the poetry of those boulevards turns into the chaos of today English metropolis, the traditional nanny becomes a dumb non-EU one, it is manifest that children no longer want to go to the park, rather preferring to petrify themselves in front of a pc screen, simulating some digital surfs on the internet abyss. After this time-jumping premise, in an historical comparative analysis of the social phenomenon, I foreshadow to place Yorgo Manis' work. A young Greek artist who, although living in London, decides to base his new pictorial production on a weird imaginary journey in Rome, a sort of “safari”. It is a completely metaphysical perspective, which aspires to become as wide and universal as possible, that leads his brush, leaving aside the mere perceptible, physical aspect of things, far from the meticulous detail of a picture or from the iconic banality of a postcard, capable to disarrange the precise indications of Google street view.

It is in the paradox of reality as reproduced by Google maps, that, even if it is perfectly coincident with reality, violates privacy and reveals the nudity of any place, is defected by the lack of frontal vision, that Manis-view ransom places itself, so far from empiric reality, but near the fundamental structures of being, capable to make the memory of snapshot more visually vague, but sensitively clear.

Yorgo Manis' work reproduces a true metaphysical vision of contemporary phenomenons as Google and Amazon. The intent is to overtake the unstable and changeable elements oh phenomenons, in order to exclusively focus on what he considers eternal, stable and necessary; so, from Google view, the thousand-year-old monuments of an historical Rome will remain, but the useless momentary details will dissolve: cars, pedestrians and transitional variables, are skilfully replaced by the luxuriant vegetation that infests the meanders of mind. It is rather cynical the artistic reproduction which schematically represents the flux of books purchases on Amazon, one of the biggest companies of e-commerce, a visual aphorism that flattens the heterogeneous plurality of the offer in a pre-determined unicum, last aim of the demand: “book purchased”. Books that are deprived of their subjective entities, wander in virtual alphanumeric channels, waiting to “jump” into realities, real subjects contemplate from the outside realities which are imprisoned in fixed perspectives, like that of Google maps, but only leaving aside the universal language of signs, somebody will really be able to understand the metaphysical challenge to reality.