Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

Notes on the sculpture of Francesco Bocchini
in Francesco Bocchini, Un braccio ruminante (“A ruminant arm”)
Text: Roberta Bertozzi - Photos: Dario Lasagni and Matteo Monti
Galleria Il segno, Rome 2009

abstract

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4.
When confronted with industrial and technical machineries, the mechanisms of Bocchini neutralise them without any alternative rhetoric or escape hatch being construed. They rather break the machinery’s constant simulation of a given goal, by directly setting up its schizophrenic work, its frantic pointless motion – by providing a simulation of imagery: such mechanisms correspond to the implementation of some aimless production that surrounds us all, to its absurd and obscene nature.
There is no paradoxical aspiration, no metaphors nor any form of grotesque; the operation is definitely akin to the one proposed by Expressionism, which denounced the vulgarity of capitalism and its cruelties and barbarism, and gave us a perfectly weighed portrait without any paraphrases or shortcuts of any sort. Similarly, Bocchini’s mechanisms do not provide the caricatural breaking of capitalism, nor its impressive deformation, yet they depict its unique, tragic and powerful image.

5.
This is a mechanics that affects all apparatuses – family, society, capital, church, industry, mental hospital, state: every apparatus becomes a mechanism predisposed to the implementation of a code. Everything is a machine, everything pushes towards equivalences without differences. Inside the metal boxes dwells the weight of all kinds of work – cerebral, muscular, atomic, biological work – one that is dead and repeated: through the metal boxes we obtain direct visibility on it, its perfect documentary, its vocal torsion. For even the inner semantics of these devices, their trudging motion through painful, conflicting and feverish leaps, and their stuttering gestures, are linguistic materials working for the disposal of sense.
A non-syllabic wording, which is deprived of syntax and, thus, appears as both defenceless and terrible, coagulates into a verdict above the surface of each work and puts its initials on their use and exchange value. The titles play a key role in confirming the absolute lack of all differences between what is organic and what is machine; they seal their own definite hybridisation and identical destination. Every system of thought, every event, every image, stop being a perspective, a content of meaning, a direction: instead, they endlessly recycle themselves in void models, in order to perpetuate their own historical operetta, which is by now contracted into a slogan, a style, or a matriculation number. As signs without referents, such works mock and trouble us, by revealing how the machine can perfectly do without our presence.