I SANTI

Santi is a project created with mixed technique — photographic portraits and painterly intervention — in collaboration with the artist Davide Pizzigoni.
Who are the Saints today? They are ordinary people, the ones we meet on the street, who have no need to appear, who refuse to reduce the icon of their own appearance to a commodity. Today’s Saint is the modern hero, the one who no longer wishes to delegate their moral duties to others.

The rejection of delegation finally entails the assumption of responsibility and turns the famous phrase from Brecht’s Galileo into an anathema, so that it becomes: “Cursed is the people that needs heroes”. Each of us can access the sacred: our sacredness resides simply in our existence and in the knowledge that si si last but a brief time. The awareness of this, and its acceptance despite everything, generates the sacredness of being. The people portrayed here, rendered in effigy, are us — we can recognize them and recognize ourselves in them at the same time. The works of Bergamo & Pizzigoni, by virtue of their large scale, seek not only to assert their own reality but to absorb, like a black hole, the reality that surrounds them. It is in this light that the use of metallic color should be read — especially steel — which clearly aims to present itself as a reflective surface, or more precisely, as an icon of the mirror of the self (the viewer). Looking at the work, the viewer sees their own image reflected, conceptually, in the metal. The image of the mirror captures reality without returning it.