Robert Gligorov - Gligorov

Essay (Italian/English) by Cristiana Perrella
Paperback
Size: cm 28 x 24
pp. 64
46 colour-illustrations
Castelvecchi Editore (March 1997)
ISBN -009-x
List Price: € 18,07 $ 17,50
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The anxiety to amaze and startle is evident in all of Gligorov's images. Every one of his works is construed to catch the eye and astonish the viewer, tempting an imagination that has already exhausted the existing possibilities and constantly needs new stimuli and accelerations, continuous crowding out and breaking of boundaries with respect to the quotidian. Faced with a society accustomed to constantly more extreme and sophisticated forms of visual communication, Gligorov chooses to raise the level of shock impact and to compete with the other stupefying images that crowd our vision. Working preferably, though not exclusively, with photographic images (in fact he also realizes videos, performance art and sculpture) Gligorov amplifies the collision force with all the means at his disposal, appealing to saturated colours, large printing dimensions and a rich use of computerized special effects. But it is in the subjects that his propensity for the bizarre, the eccentric and the scandalous chiefly reveals itself: metamorphoses, transgenetic mutations, fantastic hybridizations are described in incredible selfportraits such as Orange Face and Hulk or revealed through X-ray images as in the series XXX-Ray. The body is its protagonist, challenged in its psycho-physical resistance, in its limits and in its own identity. It is a body in the process of becoming, multiple, proteiform, which transforms itself and breaks up to recompose a new, utterly contemporary subjectivity. It is a body reconsidered with a post-human sensitivity that belongs entirely to these years of AIDS and biotechnology, of unimaginable hybridations and post-punk nihilism.

Cristiana Perrella, April 1997
(From the essay of the book)