Elisa Fantozzi

http://www.elisafantozzi.com/
Les Marchands du Temple, sculptures, 2001

There is an art to entertain sensitivities prepare dreams for them, to shape and order all our beliefs so that our expectations become a reality. Sometimes, it happens, by dint of frenzied idealism and hope, it happens that we get in touch with reality… Not necessarily by spectacularly crash-landing into it, no, but by quite simply gliding, we sometimes cover some distance and discover an unsuspected approach. This art of enchanting the sceptics can be defined as many trials meant to be reassuring, accumulated in a votive form, they can be defined by a raw materiality that enables all and sundry to hold on to that and exercise unlimited hope.

Sculpture, usually understood as the “least perfectible” art of a production because of repeated incisions it is made up of, is here, quite to the contrary, the piece that is subordinate to the multiple and varied additions of stereotypes. The unlimited cast of a trace without a model, the ultimate result of an object of belief and its transformation into an object of consumption. The figurative formal beauty of the artist’s collections of work wholly plays the role of an affirmed materiality in its petrified and possessive dimension. It gives each of the parts the necessary autonomy and coherence of its miniature symbolic worlds, to the values of the belief system that are both used and common to it. The use of shimmering primary colours applied with detailed graphical detail and technique, attributes to each work an authoritative and attractive status to the advertising rhetoric. The casts of mythical or religious characters produce their epidemical or hybrid reactions, their mind states or the cutaneous irruptions - due to the meeting of the improbable meeting of common worlds without relationships – captivatingly like no other. The spectator has the duty of reality by inventing a smile that is, in my opinion, the decisive element implemented by the artist. Not a laugh, a small quasi-indistinct glow of the spirit, an already-sweet freshness situated somewhere between sophistication and simplicity.
What weight and power are we prepared to invest in this wee individual pleasure bestowed on us by recommended visions? Is it that of our conscience or our recklessness in the face of our own credulity?
Or is it rather our incredulity?

Surely everyone can, and owes it to themselves, to act with their own sensitivity engaged by a work of art. However, the generosity used by the artist here, I cannot resolve to summarise it in the systematic development of belief totems, by the cynical and iconoclastic practice of pure and simple recycling that would operate like a dictionary of meaningless words without definitions. By that I mean that our beliefs are like reading grids of the world around us and that they remain transparent for the person to which they belong. It is not about deciding whether the representation of the Virgin Mary is more credible than a scale providing us with the weight of things in kilograms, but beguiling our conscience our credulities when our convictions are bereft of the power of adjusting to the world around us. This non-conformity, this accident would, for me, reveal itself by this smile that I mentioned earlier. Not bitterness or revolt, but a sign that instantly depicts the mobile shape of a departure forcing distance. A call to full consciousness about pride amused by the authority of coloured artefacts.

Can we overestimate such a sermon, because in the end, we are not those who are sensitive to the communicative sincerity of art works, to this joy radiated by them? Perhaps the world is neither sad nor happy? Perhaps it is up to us, and us alone, to produce what we most dearly desire? It is possible that therein lies an entire part of the artistic contribution, the contribution that casts a stone for the edification of convictions. Besides, is it not, again in this instance, only about belief?
BORIS SALLES 2003