LA SEPOLTURA DI ADAMO

Luigi Presicce’s installation immediately ushers us into a highly structured visual universe that is both fascinating and hermetic. The space is inhabited by a series of acts – five tableaux vivants – four of which make up the tale of The great Architect, while the fifth is dedicated to the death of Adam. A complex array of symbolic elements guides us in deciphering these narrative cycles: in the first four videos, we see a temple, a golden mask, the depiction of a violent death. Presicce is recounting the legend of Hiram Abiff, the architect of King Solomon’s Temple, whose murder at the hand of his followers led to the foundation of Freemasonry. In the fifth work, created for Long Play and introduced by a miniature painting, there is a rapid shift of scene: drawing on the tales of Jacobus de Voragine and the frescoes of Agnolo Gaddi and Piero della Francesca, Presicce presents The Burial of Adam, the first episode of the “Golden Legend”.
Here as well, a rich universe of elements characterizes the work: Adam’s corpse, in its mouth the tree from which the True Cross will be made; the Archangel Michael with an olive branch in his hand, trampling a demon; two disciples holding a model of Solomon’s Temple, which will be built directly over Adam’s tomb, causing the tree that sprouted from his remains to be cut down. This hotchpotch of citations and references clearly shows how Luigi Presicce’s work mingles popular culture and mystery cults, folklore and the realm of the sacred, in a completely free and selfdetermined way. On the one hand, the artist constantly focuses on humanity and its quest for the intangible, while on the other, he reflects on the role that the figure of the artist takes on in this process. It is for this reason that Presicce’s practice, so closely tied to performance, melds mythology, history, beliefs and religion in an attempt to bring these legends into the present, as if to tell us that art has always embraced faith and esoteric knowledge, mystification and reality. It is therefore impossible to reflect on Luigi Presicce’s work without seeing it as an organic body that alters in relation to the artist himself, tied to the construction of an initiatory journey, of a focus on knowledge, but also on aesthetic composition.

Luigi Presicce was born in Porto Cesareo, near Lecce, in 1976; he lives and works in Milan and Porto Cesareo. In 2008, he cofounded (with Luca Francesconi and Valentina Suma) first the review Brownmagazine and later the Brown Project Space in Milan. Since 2011, with Giusy Checola and Salvatore Baldi, he has directed Archiviazioni (exercises in the exploration and discussion of the contemporary Italian South) in Lecce. In 2011 he won the Emerging Talents Award organized by CCC Strozzina at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. He is involved in the Lu Cafausu project, which will be presented at the upcoming dOCUMENTA (13) - Kassel in 2012.