I AM (NOT) THERE
"Nobody is serious, when they're seventeen"
Romance - Arthur Rimbaud
Oscar is a teenager: he spends long hours in his bedroom, the only place where life seems possible. His bedroom is his private universe, where he is allowed to be whoever he wants to, where the dull and strict realities of school and family cannot access.
There, there's room just for dreams, for imagined adventures, for endless armchair journeys.
There's no hurry to grow up, nor to choose: to be or not to be is not a problem anymore, since " being" is always another.
Oscar's bedroom is small and yet, it is infinite: it spreads everywhere and everywhen.
Past and future mix up, shaping a present which only there can be perceived as real - almost as real as imagination can be.
Coin de Table
The pictures which constitute the installation are easily recognizable - all of them being paintings form the nineteenth century.
They all seem to be portraits of boys, either lost in thought or provocatively looking at the viewer.
Only one picture has been manipulated - the most ambiguous one and that which gives the name to the work. By role playing the missing character in the painting and by taking the same seat which, in a similar painting by the same author, is occupied by Arthur Rimbaud, I talk about Oscar's influences.
Since Oscar as a " character " doesn't exist in any specific time or place ( doesn't have to negotiate with "this" present time, past and future being just other possible presents), he can exist anywhere and at any time, according to the temporary and changeable characteristics that define him.
This work looks at the way we can obsessively desire to be somewhere else and, perhaps, also everywhere else.
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