Hollywood | Mestre

HOLYWOOD

November 26 - December 12, 2005 | photography | Galleria Contemporaneo, Mestre

Curated by Interno3 & Andrea Morucchio

Catalog with texts by: Saramicol Viscardi, Marcello Tari, Marco Baravalle, Massimo De Bortoli, Andrea Morucchio

Andrea Morucchio’s The Main Show presents a lateral sequence of three black-and-white photographic prints of Antonio Canova’s Pietà, each captured from slightly different angles. At once austere and disquieting, the work engages a double genealogy: on the one hand, the persistence of sacred archetypes within the visual arts; on the other, the translation of these archetypes into the cinematic and media imaginaries of modernity.

The plaster casts of Canova’s sculptures are punctuated by small bronze markers—technical devices that codify and transfer the canon of classical proportions. These points function as a system of measurement, but also as an abstract matrix of beauty, an aesthetic code that extends from neoclassical idealism into the visual paradigms of the contemporary spectacle. In this sense, Morucchio’s intervention recalls Walter Benjamin’s insight into the reproducibility of the artwork: once anchored in cult value, sacred imagery has gradually migrated into the regime of exhibition and circulation, where its authority is reframed by the logics of mass media.

The Pietà as icon belongs to a long tradition of what Aby Warburg defined as Pathosformeln—condensed, repeatable figures that transmit affective intensity across time and media. The Passion of Christ, and particularly the image of the dead Son cradled by the Mother, constitutes one of the most powerful of these formulas, reappearing incessantly in painting, sculpture, and later cinema. From Pasolini’s ascetic realism to Mel Gibson’s hyper-dramatic excess, the Pietà persists as a visual script whose affective charge is continually re-actualized.

Morucchio situates this archetype within the horizon of Hollywood—understood not only as an industry but, in Guy Debord’s terms, as a société du spectacle: a global apparatus that shapes and governs the circulation of images. By repositioning Canova’s Pietà within this framework, The Main Show foregrounds the proximity between sacred representation and cinematic spectacle, revealing the extent to which both rely on visual strategies of persuasion, pathos, and collective identification.

Formally, the work activates what might be described as a proto-cinematic effect. The slight variations of angle between the three photographs compel the gaze into a horizontal oscillation, an attempt to resolve the minimal differences. This lateral scanning recalls the basic mechanism of film: the succession of still frames producing the illusion of movement. Here, however, the motion is not mechanical but perceptual, generated by the viewer’s own act of looking. In this way, Morucchio interrupts the traditional stasis of the Pietà and reanimates it as a time-based image, one that hovers between photography and cinema, between devotional icon and moving spectacle.

The Main Show thus operates simultaneously as an homage and a critical displacement: it situates the neoclassical sacred form within the apparatus of contemporary visual culture, exposing the deep continuities between religious archetypes and the modern spectacle industry, while asking us to consider how affect, pathos, and beauty are codified, reproduced, and re-enacted across the shifting media of history.