Horti Lamiani is a multi-functional space which is to be used as a new exhibition area. This is a time of great activity and many new areas are being opened in our town. It is a cultural association in the real sense of the word which works towards integration on various fronts – an area for shows and book presentations,  painting and theatre workshops with special attention to the more disadvantaged social groups, a gallery where young artists may exhibit and a centre coordinated by a young staff of curators. The exhibition area, with Claudio Di Carlo’s exhibition, and its significant title linked to “life inside and out”,  inaugurates an official act on the part of the institutions, in harmony with the social and political commitment of the various cultural initiatives, and a cultural exchange between artists on the international border line.
Perfectly in line with our association, founded in 1988 with the intent of promoting and carrying out social, cultural and didactic activities aimed at the moral and cultural elevation of the individual, the exhibition fits well into the social and geographical context where Horti Lamiani is placed. The founding principle of the association is the promotion of art and culture, as a human activity capable of favouring communication; for this reason, our statute contemplates that art and culture should not be for a restricted circle of connoisseurs or an élite of a privileged few, but is aimed at all those who are interested in finding out about and experimenting with their creative abilities. It gave me great pleasure that  Claudio Di Carlo’s venture, during the evening of the inauguration of his exhibition entitled “Life in”, provoked an on-going dialogue with the visitors to the exhibition area who reacted so favourably to the short performances directed by him. In this way, art has recovered one of its most important values, that of direct communication and a mutual exchange between the artist and the viewer.

TALKING OF LIVING AND ACTING 
Simona Cresci 
 “Between art and life” (Rauschenberg)

Men, like artists,  are formed by experience. This is our starting-point for presenting Claudio Di Carlo’s works which, under the title of Life in, are the result of an extraordinary artistic activity leading him to be a protagonist in important human affairs based on the sharing of ideals and collective experiences: “my history and professional growth have been living life”. Claudio Di Carlo moved into the Ice Basile Studio in Rome in 1999 to continue his collective experience of cohabitation which he had begun at the age of 16 when he left Pescara, his home town, to live in the first Hippy comune in Italy spread over five farmhouses in the Piedmont mountains. To contextualise Claudio Di Carlo’s works – today concentrated in painting – it is not possible to ignore his artistic training which he undertook in Pescara at a time (the ‘seventies) when, after the influence of the student protests, there were alternative cultural and avant-garde choices.
Claudio Di Carlo, fired by the same principles, took an active part in the events of the time with musical and artistic events which became his channel of communication. Such events were the consequence of political and economic events which had taken place in the ‘sixties when, at the same time as American imperialism was expanding and European capitalism was developing, the commodification of art products was rationalised to its limit: gallery owners and museum directors began to call themselves managers of artistic production, creating market structures and infrastructures similar, in some ways, to those of normal companies. Artsists protested loudly at this ideological conditioning in their sector which meant the transformation of figurative art into an instrument of consensus on the part of the system and the dominant social classes. Such a consensus came about not only in the area of imperialism but also in that subordinated to European capitalistic countries; in addition, the contradictions within imperialistic development (Vietnam) and capitalistic development of European countries was becoming more and more accentuated. The consequences were the student revolution, the May protest in France, and challenges to social and cultural institutions. Student and youth revolts in Rome, Paris and Berlin brought about a wave of renewal and  transformation which spread through Europe and made radical criticisms  at industrial hegemonic expansion. Artists, for their part, went against a system of art as merchandise in the general system of the economy; they took part in the movement through political experiences with people’s ateliers, printing wall posters, organising and promoting concerts and performances of various kinds thereby expressing a clear approval of the whole on-going protest.
In the second half of the ‘seventies,  Pescara experienced moments of great artistic and cultural ferment, leading to the founding, in 1977, of “Convergenze”, a place where artists of different generations and opposing expressive experiences (including Claudio Di Carlo) met to promote music, poetry, visual arts and theatre, and held important debates on cultural ideas and trends. “Convergenze”, perfectly in line with the events of the decade, became the place where artistic production coincided with the vital act of the artist – the object was represented with the action, the event, out of a need to penetrate reality. It was in these very years that Di Carlo’s cultural formation grew,  culminating, in the ‘eighties, with the institution of rock music groups, and collective actions and performances. With such actions, the artist expressed the assumption of art-life which conveyed itself as the direct experience of the artist in reality, after his awareness of the early avant-garde. He thus set in motion the process of aggregation which encouraged the meeting of such diverse forms of expression as to make a work spectacular. His decision to convey his message through music and the founding of the first multi-medial centre called “Officina” (Workshop), stemmed from the need to evolve  artistic research which posed 
alternative to the traditional circuits. Today, however, although this theory of life has been partly abandoned, as a result of a personal evolution which in most cases leads a person to follow different paths from the ones that characterised his or her formation, Claudio Di Carlo, while managing to reconcile his painting, music and theatre activities, still preserves his openness towards the other arts. The importance of his work includes the study of the composition and architecture of the image in which the representation of detail in the female figure, portrayed in all its sensuality and erotic abandon, make  it possible to maintain a state of ambiguity which the entire figure could otherwise vulgarise. His interest is not directed towards the recounting of the subject represented, but by means of a balanced use of background colours and precise brush-strokes, he reveals an articulate stylistic quest. Claudio Di Carlo, eternally aware of living in his times, seems to compose a harmonic piece of music with his paintings, a result of  individual expression, a desire to communicate the social value of making art. During the inauguration of the exhibition Life in, Di Carlo’s intention to continue representing a new objective dimension with a spectacular example of group work was very evident; taking his paintings as a starting-point, various artists were involved in a series of behavioural and musical performances thus offering the large audience the opportunity, once again, to interpret the language of art based on exchange and confrontation.

WHEN LIFE IS INSIDE…
Paola D’Andrea

For Claudio Di Carlo, woman is a sentimental target, the object which translates his passion for life, the poetical obsession which absorbs him in every stage of the preparation of a photographic set, during which the definitive pictorial image emerges, spontaneous and free. Women are destroyers and creators, the beings nearest the gods writes Di Carlo; through this statement, which penetrates his painting,  he confers vividness to his materials and wounds his subject by an excess of love which invades it. Women are a melody of variable worth which constitutes an organic, musical thought on life: red is the counterpoint which attracts the eye and combines pictorial melodies, according to certain traditional rules. Spiritual icons towards which everything converges and offers itself, women are expressed with the liturgy of the (pictorial) gesture and the gesture of the senses, sought-after by man who carries out his work to gain the place of his artistic and spiritual existence: “Work is my church”, says the artist, using a phrase which is yet again a rhythmic and melodic cue for his painting. In his paintings, we achieve the conclusion of a story, when calmness enwraps the eros, the human aspect of a primordial language which elevates the being to its spirituality. From this liminal moment on, the observer may re-process a more personal, private story which recalls his most guarded, emotional or even pungent memories. The image originates from a hyperfocal focussing of the subject and the symbolic substitution of an object, a gesture, a shoe, and feminine accessory, and its reduction to an instinct which has some relation with the desire to observe. Women are stripped of their inhibitions, caught in their moments of privacy, spontaneity, stillness, but the director of their actions is still the artist who translates, in the naturalness of these gestures, his mystical adoration of the female universe and the natural erotic authority of their movements – adoration for all  women, loved, opposed, venerated, through art experienced as a necessity, a primordial instinct, an erotic curiosity on a par with the inhibitions of adulthood. The tendency to give prominence to the sensual aspects of the subject derive subconsciously from a consideration on reality in a Freudien sense. But Di Carlo looks at reality through the eyes of a child, using the voyeuristic energy of the gaze, typical of adolescence. His vision penetrates a reality made up of indiscretions, it brings closer and dominates the objects of its affection; then the artist’s hallucination picks up a part of the female body in an attitude which activates the observer’s desire. The hyperrealism of the close-up slant translates the images into signs, subconscious and oneiric fantasies, dictated by the desire to reveal narrative aspects in a partial manner in order to stimulate fantasies and stories in the observer, not only the pleasure deriving from the gaze of a voyeur through the keyhole. The artist is the man who, present in the room, experiences those stories as a “discreet” observer, and functions as a passive completer of the moment recounted. In the picture, the man is always absent because art is his salvation, it is the only pure condition for entering into relations with the subject. The narcissistic relationship of the artist with women robs them of nothing; on the contrary it underlines the clear superiority of his state of nature, because it is expressed through an art totally offered to them. Stating that women are “the decorative essence of the painting”, the artist is able to complete a search into the modular structure of the image and its single elements portrayed, which belong to the grace of the female ego, but which are the bones of the internal structure of the picture. The subject is decorative, conferring importance to the motif of the work, with its appearance, and slant, which serve the artist as signs for recognition, and are a tribute to the object of his inspiration.
The camouflaging of the subject within the space of the picture, from bottom to top, in a part for the whole, reflects the wish to focus on the female being during the act of revealing herself, in a pure state, which represents a form of sublimation towards art. The image does not reveal the erotic and carnal aspects of the story, it asks us to go inside, but then it makes us “crawl” in another dimension, because it is no longer of this world. It is like not  being able to call to mind a rock song by an artist who has devoted his life to the most disparate forms of art, of which music is one; a song which each of us remembers as the sound track of a particular moment in our lives. When I look and look again at his paintings, I am reminded of a few lines of One, by U2: “You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl (…) one love, one blood, one life, you got to do what you should…one life, but we are not the same”. Male and female co-exist in the soul of the artist in perfect “ecstatic” harmony, before a microcosm of image, illuminated by a crystalline light which cools the erotic tension within which they originate. The gaze comvenes around the details to make everything more abstract: life is an eternal tragedy of the fleeting moment, the object which, by association, calls up a memory, becoming dramatic because it is reaching the end of a story, a farewell, a physical and mental emotion.
The “cinematographic” gaze of the artist lingers on frames, flat backgrounds, phrases which keep returning; his work evolves organically, like an LP which summarises the pictorial, behavioural performative production of the artist. Music works on the timbres and its use by assonance serves the painter by forcing the visual canons, marking out the blues, reds, browns and whites to achieve his pictorial symphony, in memory of an artistic tradition which is renewed and ennervated out of ideas from the past,  while looking to a richer, more felt, more poetical artistic future….during the twilight of the senses, the moment for looking and living Claudio Di Carlo’s art.

ART AND POLITICS
Francesca Pietracci

Claudio Di Carlo’s work is “political”, and has been so from the start, back in the ‘70’s;  the early stimulus of those years is still present in his works today. Indeed, up till the present day, he has worked within the phenomena of art, becoming a catalyst for important musical events, performances and various kinds of public events connected with communication. His painting, which is without doubt the central element of his expression, may be compared to a cathodic tube which broadcasts continuously unconstrained by censorship, the forms of his emotional imagination. Languid, fetishistic, erotic, sacral or transgressive though it be, it is always the objective result, the revelation, of a therapy he practises daily and spontaneously, and which enables him to elude the emotional blackmail established powers try to exercise over individuals and society. His art could be described as a sort of vaccine which produces antibodies, a safeguard protecting the sphere of intentions and desires, the imagination which fuels the stimulus for perpetual transformation. And if the tendency in art in recent years has been to show clarity and perfection while concealing the brutality of the contents within a crystal ball, Claudio Di Carlo has undoubtedly taken a different direction, given that his style and poetics coincide. The seduction wielded by his images of women takes its origin both from the gesture represented and the pictorial gesture, which is essentially paranoid and closely tied to details, nuances  and warm softness, with a strong sense of self mockery. And it is by following this line that it becomes highly stimulating to underline the slant he gives to the image. It is a zoom-in, an extra element which makes the difference and which, from the start, has characterised his works, as if it were a question of  images “stolen” from a sequence. A strong link with the cinema, therefore,  projects its traditional pictures onto the canvas within a language of communication which belongs exclusively to the moving picture. The painting is transformed into frames and, in the sequentiality of each work one may perceive the before and after, imagine a story told by the eye which frames and chooses the real protagonist of the work. His women, but also the famed, phallic “Ringo”, are the objects of his emotional journey through the world. Observing his work is a little like listening to those ‘70’s songs by singer-songwriters which used to ring so true because they were able to recount the petty, silly little private stories we all have. But these are stories which have a different rhythm – the rhythm of pictures is different from that of music. The rhythm which emerges from Claudio Di Carlo’s images is the one to be found in the world of advertising and in other artists. I like to think that it is an aesthetic prerogative of the times and not plagiarism, 
because in every era the ideas and substance are values which belong, albeit subconsciously, to society, and having a numerically significant following means an artist has struck home.  In the same way with this exhibition which starts from Rome and takes different paths, the artist manages to appear as the director of a series of performances, apparently improvised and confused and also involving the audience, which make the observer wonder what is behind the glossy image of the paintings. One of the events worth mentioning is that of a brilliant actress, Miriam Abutori, of the “Teatro degli Artefatti” who lies on a red velvet sofa, motionless and naked, pale and emaciated, for the whole of the vernissage. Her flesh is white and transparent, her gaze fixed and nails painted green, representing a sort of warning. She reminds me of a Bergman film “The serpent’s egg”, a masterpiece of  jerky scenes, or “The blue angel” by Heinrich Mann, where the amalgam of good and evil flows indistinctly beyond individual awareness and premonition.

Rome, January, 2003  
                                 
SEX AND GEOMETRY
Pietro Roccasecca

Titian’s Danae, in which the sexual act is represented symbolically in the form of golden rain falling into the nymph’s lap, and the less
well-known but evocative Jove and I by Correggio, in which the nymph is possessed by the god in the form of a mighty cloud, represent a moment of lucid perception of the difficult equilibrium which it is necessary to establish in every era between the producer of the image, its consumer and morals, so that the work can be lawful and recognised as art.
The demand for realism in the pictorial representation of the female nude – which we could describe as a parable which commenced with Pisanello’s Lust and reached its climax and the start of its fall with Manet’s Olympia – has had  (and still has) to come to terms with  morals.
It is not only a question of customs, desires and pleasure being controlled, but the representation of the human body posing the problem of beauty, and beauty that of identity and diversity. Renaissance studies on the proportions of the human body led to anthropometrics, to Lombroso’s studies and the development of measures used by the police to check identity, but above all, by establishing the canons of perfection of the human species, they paved the way towards Nazi concentration camps.
The real exercise of this control was not so much over the image of the nude itself, since artists and purchasers, as we have seen, were able to construct fables giving a literary guise to nudity, but over the moment when the artist is before nudity. That’s where the scandal is, in the naked eye which examines a body throbbing with life. The Art Academies of the 16th and 17th centuries found one of the reasons for their existence when exercising jurisdiction over that moment. Painting a nude in the flesh had to take place at sittings controlled by them. Meetings which were not authorised caused a scandal and were unlawful. The woman taking part, as a model or artist, was accused of harlotry.
Contemporary artists, like Claudio Di Carlo, do not imitate the body, rather they perfect it, purify it. The body, smooth and polished, is portrayed in the essentiality of Pythagorian proportions encapsulating the most intimate law of nature. The body is studied in its single parts – shoulders, knees, breasts, feet – and all the analogies with geometric forms are sought – ovals, ellipsoids and cylinders.
The intimate geometry of the nude is exalted in its relation to architecture and mechanisms. John G. Ballard in the Exhibition of atrocities vividly described the geometrical pleasure of postmodernist nudes, radicalising the relationship between the body and a manufactured product ending in their mutual compenetration: *”La giovane donna era un’equazione geometrica, il modello di un paesaggio. I suoi seni, le sue natiche illustravano una superficie neperiana a curvatura costante negativa, il coefficiente differenziale 
della pseudosfera.” Tabert, Ballard’s alter ego “riusciva a collegare il movimento delle cosce e dei fianchi della giovane donna all’architettura del pavimento e del soffitto. Egi aveva accettato senza eccezioni la logica dell’unione sessuale: tutte le giunture si equivalgono, che siano quelle morbide della nostra biologia o le geometrie rigide di queste pareti e di questi soffitti. Lui ricordava questi piaceri: la congiunzione tra il pube esposto di lei e il profilo lucente del bidet; il cubo bianco del bagno che quantificava il suo seno destro appena lei si sporgeva sul lavandino; le sue cosce appiattite sulle piastrelle; la mano destra di lei che sfiorava il pannello dei pulsanti dell’ascensore”.*
The surprising postmodernist clarification of the link between sex and geometry is, in my view, further proof of how pleasure in the nude is connected to the desire to know the design of a natural order.
I believe I am experiencing all the difficulties and variables of the path of independence without getting isolated, above all in the so-called “art world”, in which independence stands for the ability to survive before having done “everything”. 
Enacting one’s own strategies.

Horti Lamiani is a cultural association, a political space, halfway between a smart gallery and a social club; it is situated in the Esquilino district of Rome on the left flank of Termini Station. It is an advanced laboratory, and not only multi-cultural but disposed for new, exciting human activities. Horti Lamiani, with all its apparent and real contradictions, seemed the best place for me to set up “Life in”; The ecstatic, naked pallor of Miriam Arbutori and her activating the perception of temperature; the primordial forms of life of Emanuela Barbi’s Adriatic shells displayed in the window of a gallery; the drawings of these shells by Alessandro Gabini who is sitting naturally in the window behind a computer which projects scenes taken by him earlier in the morning in the district around the gallery; Mauro Tiberi’s voice producing sounds together with a selection of the background noises around the exhibition area; the ironical, relaxed reaction of the “participants” to the spectator/clown Costa Pucci. All of these have interacted with their works, persons and space. Before and through the eyes of Cristina Vuolo and Gianluca Stuard, everyone’s acts become one great behavioural act, limited in time. Poetic action, political action. The interventions, not planned but welcome and functional, of the photoperformer, Luigi Viola, the musician Marcello Alulli, and the film director Federica Tuzi have made my path through art and life even more suited to my nature.
The time and space which Horti Lamiani, the curators, critics and artists have devoted to my exhibition have made “Life in” possible.