PULP SILENCE 

 

In every stillness, in every silence of all sounds lies the stifled seed of subversion.

The balance of an entire world can rest upon deceptive masks and the representations of life can be born out of a fake idea: it is the secret chapter of western contemporary history. 

The mass society has explored all forms of beauty, of obscurity and violence through new means of popularization and widespread reproducibility; the twentieth century has crystallized in the abrupt, fast fluxes of the metropolitan universe, creating icons, symbols and new values forever reproduced. 

And yet, amidst such glitter, such sparkle of image and life and color, in the most secret recesses of this new metropolitan world hides the spectre of alienation. 

From Pop culture to Street Art, attempts have been made to give a unifying sense to the new culture of consumption, of representation and marketability of the image. The art of the second half of the twentieth century is an art in revolt; it is the reaction of the single individual to the massification of taste and the consumerism of images.

 

Enza Messini investigates a hidden chapter of postmodernism. They are the stories of vpiceless women, adolescents and children. They are the commercialized of our time, individuals-objects who explode, eschew, rebel against the heinous equilibrium of an imposed identity. 

In Enza’s work, the gender identity is remoulded in the atrocious whirlwind of history, through symbols sought amongst the appalling and never unveiled pillars of civilian society: the rage and the violence, the prevarication (abuse of power?) and the plastic-like  sensuality.

Pulp culture, born to lend an epic breadth to the alienating daily grind, has dug out in the recesses of the warring, materialistic male culture, stripping (them) of all meaning and grasping its provocative value. 

Enza recovers the dialectics of neo-Pop and Pulp cinema, making it a surprising kaleidoscope of provocative as well as provoking bodies and faces, sarcastically citing the feminine image as transmitted by the media.  

Likewise, she conjures up the deadly alchemy sought by the industry of the image: the representation of one’s body which comes to confuse and deny itself through the accessory,  transfigured here into the weapon as a means of oppression and rebellion.

In the formal and chromatic harmony of such violent and silent rebellion, Enza tells us the story of an identity denied by the others and by herself, transmigrated from a past of prevarication to a present of commercialization.

The tragedy of a womanliness which, by recovering the grim elements of the male image and of the twentieth century’s diatribe, withdraws into a limbo whereby roles blur, feelings are denied, weaknessess get hidden behind the violence and the cynicism of 1970’s screenplays.

In the same way, Enza’s children swap being adults for play with games for adults. Rejected by a world that doesn’t conceive innocence, the child who is no longer told fairy tales growls his rage about the game over, in a videogaming world where salvation is, once more, to be found in the Pulp adventure of violence.

The title of one of Enza’s works is enough to understand that there exist children who do not dream of a fireman future, but want to be “soldier”.  

A tender and atrocious irony tells the story of a rebellion as dense with rage, noise and color as it is invisible, unthinkable, inaudible.

The tender, playful victims scream unheard from the depth of the Pulp silence; in their always changing provocations lies all of the request for attention and rights, for power and transgression. Yet, in their always akin gazes lies something fragile and secret, timid and ancient like, perhaps, a supreme plea for love.