Corrado Cascianelli

In the portraits and fine-art projects I stage those dialogues that I imagine come to life amidst the different states of the ego when an impulse arises to upset the balance. More than images, they are scripts running between drama and comedy revealing fragments of the complex and contradictory human truth in order to invite the viewer to make an emotional encounter with something of himself. A work that is based on the short circuit between geometry and irony and that steals inspirations from transactional psychoanalysis, neapolitan theater, classical harmony, seventeenth-century space.

SOCIAL SHOWCASES - 2022

“Social Showcases” peeks through the profiles of social networks and finds a tragicomic aspect that characterizes our contemporaneity. In fact, the relational environment in which we interact seems to be built like an endless beehive in which virtual cells squeeze fat egos that, winking complacently towards their followers beyond the screen, do not even know how to perceive their oppressive condition. The same queen of social media, while extending her influence on the five continents with her 28 million followers, shows that she is unable to free herself from this bond by declaring that she is always aiming to be the Chiara she would like to be.

The Photographer

The Bear

The Queen

The Bear

The Teacher

Nárkissos - 2022

With the Nárkissos project I seek the truth in the artifice of photographic representation. Is it hidden in what we see or in us who are looking? Is it therefore beyond or on this side of the picture frame? I find it trapped in that membrane that separates the two worlds, in that screen onto which we project the expectation of recognizing and being recognized. Only when this boundary is revealed do the dimensions merge and we observers are observed at the same time. Put in relationship with ourselves, touched in the depths of our intimacy, we can be seized by a disturbance. This fleeting mood is that sliver of truth we've been looking for.

THROUGH THE MIRROR, THE APPLE IS ROTTEN! - 2021

It stems from the need to share a claustrophobic feeling of helplessness born out of noticing the difficulties that many teenagers manifest in trying to communicate in their own language.
The protagonist of the story is devious. He is capable of acting with great power while remaining unnoticed. It is the display of the smartphone, the interface placed between us and the medium that conveys many of our thoughts is by no means a neutral element in the communicative process, on the contrary, it leads us to skim messages and inhibit practice in articulating complex thoughts. The apple, and the concepts of freedom and progress it carries in Western culture, is rotten, suffocated in a narrow 16:9 space and crushed by the same " framework" that is representing it.

LOCKED DOWN - 2020

The project "Locked Down" takes shape from the personal and intimate observation of my emotions during the long isolation imposed by the outbreak of Covid-19 in the months between February and May 2020. The study draws inspiration from the seventeenth-century vànitas and consists of a series of self-portraits, single or articulated in triptychs, set in a barely perceptible space that plays the role of antagonist. On stage a crescendo of alternate emotional states arising from the comparison between the different personalities that live in me. Abandoned to the mercy of itself, the ego compresses and expands, it seeks the light in need of a solid point of reference as well as escape, it fragments, dissolves and then vanishes leaving only silence.