Arnold Mario Dall'O
The work of Arnold Mario Dall'O crosses all the memory of the West through the symbols of Christianity, through the proliferation of images, through that cultural short circuit from which we can no longer get out since the last decade of the last century. For an artist who invented the "Republic of Welcome", an exhibition entitled "Hellcome" may seem a step backwards. But the passage lies only in the irony, in a greater accentuation of the negative and less and less hopeful aspect of this look at the "western files", at the memories of today's world.
For this reason the exhibition presents a connection with some previous works including a splendid "Family Portrait" composed of one hundred works in which the game of metamorphosis and repetition is mixed with a sense of bewilderment and considerable emptiness. Everything appears and returns changed and not even the game of identities becomes possible. A symbol that is often present in his works is the deer head with its sumptuous and imposing antler tree.
As a good South Tyrolean Arnold Mario Dall'O he knows how this symbol not only stands for Christ, so much so that a Latin cross often appears in the popular iconography between the antlers. But it is also the symbol of hunting, death and abandonment. In the work that gives the title to the exhibition, "Hellcome", dozens of silver-clad toy soldiers have been applied to the horns: Christianity, the West is confused with war, with force. Spirituality turns into its opposite, showing only a misunderstanding, an illusion.
But other religious symbols are also overturned in their opposite, not because of a form of trivial scandalism, but because the Catholic and Christian religion as the origin of our civilization shares its decadence as an efficient origin and cause.
The accumulation of images according to Arnold is equivalent to the disappearance of the things they represent. Hell is precisely this: to be condemned to live among the simulacra of a world in which reality and truth are addressless addresses.
Da buon sud tirolese dall’O sa come questo simbolo non solo stia a significare il Cristo, tant’è che spesso nell’iconografia popolare tra le corna compare una croce latina. Ma è anche il simbolo della caccia, della morte, dell’abbandono. Nell’opera che dà il titolo alla mostra, “Hellcome”, sulle corna sono stati applicati decine di soldatini rivestiti di argento: il cristianesimo, l’Occidente si confonde con la guerra, con la forza. La spiritualità si tramuta nel suo contrario mostrandosi solo un fraintendimento, un’illusione.
Ma anche altri simboli religiosi vengono rovesciati nel loro opposto, non per una forma di banale scandalismo, ma perché la religione cattolica e cristiana in quanto origine della nostra civiltà ne condivide la decadenza in quanto origine e causa efficiente.
L’accumulo di immagini secondo Arnold dall’O equivale alla scomparsa delle cose che esse rappresentano. L’inferno è proprio questo: essere condannati a vivere tra i simulacri di un mondo in cui la realtà e la verità sono indirizzi privi di destinatario.