‘The most interesting and curious debate of the last years is centred around the hypothesised laicisation of contemporary catastrophic suggestions, which are now stripped of all their religious value … We must say straight away that the nature of modern life — particularly our life, so profoundly influenced by technology – is not at all rigid or fixed, but rather a fluid way of living … There no longer exists a universally valid aesthetic concept, detached from the rest of experience; everything is centred around intricate analogies or formal and structural homologies. Young people’s art is nowadays dominated by the idea of the fantasy, memory and imagination, which reproduce themselves and grow stronger. What is the recognition given to contemporary artists by our society? Let’s take a step back and talk about monkeys, we were these animals at the origins of cosmos, and one day we might return to that stage. But monkeys are also the obvious witnesses of the superhuman sublimity of man’s conquest. There also exists a monkey-man who defies the great fear of the atom and faces the unknown and the unusual with a more aware irony. Artists know well today that from this picture there derives a contradiction: that science – which is the greatest form of rationalisation – behaves like the sleep of reason and therefore generates monsters. The contradiction lies in the fact that sometimes we attribute to nature and to magic a disruptive role, otherwise attributable to the subconscious. Young people look for an iconographic realisation of science, but this is an alienating path which leads to a schizophrenic split between man-nature and man-science. The total monster no longer lives in the subconscious, as it used to do in the past; there are no more secret fears but manifest, daily, hyper-real terrors. Whatever creates a perturbation becomes an inseparable part of social life; indeed the logic of the equilibrium does require a social life built on the perturbing. Art takes science back to its original but opposite status; science no longer serving the need for a beginning and an end, but rather the continuity of the end. Modern art witnesses a clash between the individual and society; the impotence of an individual realisation – like in tragic myth – becomes a daily dimension, which no longer talks to us about hostile gods, but about a bourgeois vision of the tragic which contains in itself its own denial. The young artist sometimes puts side by side two different kinds of images, an ordinary and an extraordinary one. The entrance of the extraordinary in the ordinary world reminds us of Giuliano Nucci, Riccardo Lumaca, Pino Settanni, while the entrance of the ordinary in the extraordinary world, reminds us of Nicola Maria Martino, Kokocinsky, Cinalli, Ragalzi, and other important artists as Mario Fallini, Tanganelli, Gnozzi, Barni, Galliani, Di Giusto, Zevola, Dragomirescu, who work with a style which is qualitatively and quantitatively deforming. Sometimes they picture giants and sometimes the ordinary elements of the man-object. A painting or a sculpture then become the places for passages and transformations, the places where the ordinary becomes extraordinary and viceversa. Marisa Vescovo’