January-February 1985
There are three subsets in this 1978-1979 photographic exhibition; more recent mixed works (drawings and collages), and a video made on site. All these works testify to a sense of secrecy and strangeness that places them in the tradition of Italian metaphysical painters, but without the surreal bric-a-brac.
In her photographic works, Zaza uses massive, enigmatic faces (those of her own parents), as well as vast spaces (skies or walls), punctuated by signs of intervention: painterly traces on the faces, small sculptures of cotton or breadcrumbs. The faces and forms deeply root Zaza in a place (southern Italy) and a history (that of primitive religious art, for example), while the poses and punctuations break this filiation and give the work a character of metaphysical abstraction. The graphic works deepen the photographic work, which is sometimes integrated into the construction of a personal symbolic space, a microcosm in which Zaza plays on the tensions between light and shadow and the whole range of grays, on angles and roundings, the gestures of tracing and collage intervention. The video (Cielo Abitato, 30 min.) is an extension of and commentary on these recent works. In a sense, its slowness and refusal of technique run counter to the medium. But it also reveals the sculptural dimension of his work, and the intensity that inhabits it. Faces and objects move across the fields with extremely slow movements, barely perceptible tremors; through the interplay of shadows and the paint that partly covers them, through superimpositions, the faces seem to burst under the effect of a very great tension, with the immense serenity of the background (the “sky”) as a counterpoint. This is a true artist’s video, fascinating in that it is closer to Zaza’s plastic work than to today’s specifically videographic research. Neither a reportage nor a “romp” in an unusual medium, it evokes the deeply religious breathing and waiting that lie at the heart of Michèle Zaza’s work.
