Guido Mocafico's images steer the viewer into a systematic and specifically engineered perspective. Built as an alloy of the sharp, the arcane and the sterile, Mocafico's works appear hyperreal in his unflinching focus of real detail. Take the fluffed tarantulas in his "Aranea" series, the robust acuteness releases a hypnotic abstraction. These natural forms become 3D Rorschach inkblots unfurling with unusual asymmetry. With tendons leeching outwards like barbed wire or electric cables, these familiar shapes and wholly natural simplicity begin to export a far more reactive illusion. However, it is not all miracles of nature. Mocafico's imagery is shaded with clues.
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| Avicularia Aurantiaca - Aranea |
For example, painterly characteristics are manifested in "Stilleven". The indistinguishable facet of these still-life ensure a decisive traction between the photographic image and the painted canvas. Understandably, as Mocafico - having studied Dutch and German still-life of the seventeenth and eighteenth century- rendered the fine details from paintings by Floris van Dijck and Pieter Claesz with exacting precision, bringing a new spirit to these antique paintings. A carbon copy of a golden age. Through this reassembling, Mocafico acknowledges antediluvian practices and contorts them with the lightest touch. The reminiscence of spirit in these images is countered with wavering verisimilitude.
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| Vanitas - Stilleven |
With this ambivalence between truth and falsity lay claim to an altogether elusive correctness that embodies much of Mocafico's work. From jellyfish that float like sparkling melancholic bacterium, guns which sit doe-eyed and stiff like anarchic apparatus from some ancient regime to watch faces which seem like satellite images of a sic-fi metropolis, the abstract is installed into the everyday. What we see is so obvious, so rigorously pedalled to our reception with its vitrine-like confinement, the simplicity on show can appear indefinable. Collaborating with magazines such as Self-Service, Wallpaper and Paradis, Mocafico has tempted the world of fashion. Maybe it's no sin to be tempted by his serpents either.
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| Rhizastoma - Medusa |
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