Christian Zanotto

Christian Zanotto is born in Marostica (Vicenza, Italy) in 1972.
He attended Art School of Nove (Vicenza) and Venice Fine Arts Academy (both Painting and Decoration); from 2000 he lives and works in Amsterdam.
In his works live together a rigorous planning spirit and a sacred respect for a continuous search between image and material. He can pass from science to pornography on some ecstasy levels which join she-saints and porn stars, contradictions that translate themselves in the treatment of plastic and chemical materials, like polyester resin and naturals as well, such as the handmade cotton papers, painted with natural pigments.

The last works (2010) are very elaborated, realized through the combination of photography and virtual images which then are tranferred on big crystal surfaces through a photographic exposure process; Zanotto realizes also videos related to these material artworks, videos which are sorts of flights through the universe in which the images of the paintings exist in their immateriality "made of light"; every element of these art-movies (images,sounds,music,words) is created on this purpose.The large framed crystals are in the meantime mirrors and thresholds. Like mirrors they are not isolated, but instead interacting with the surrounding space through the reflection; like thresholds they constitute openings which give us the opportunity to catch a foreshortening of a world which is omnipresent and living, but rarely shows itself in a direct way. This universe is psycho-philosophic, normally hidden and veiled, but the artist enables us to see it, bringing it to light. On the psychologic side the artwork is a travel-analysis inside the human psyche, beyond the boundaries of the individual personality, to reach its deepest level, the one of the collective consciousness, extremely alive and full of strong energies ; on the philosophic side the artist wants to place his search in the middle of this broad and subterranean conscience as this is the specific site where to confront ourselves and find an answer about the foundation of our existence, the place where to find explanations about the condition of the human being. With this aim like starting point Zanotto works trying in the first place to look from the most neutral possible point of view, free of preconceptions, to seek with the aid of the maximum objectivity, strongly aware of the logical impossibility to base ourselves on certainties. The iconography of this artwork is, for this, religious-like, not for adhesion to a creed but to get nearer to the icons created by man for the purposes of his religion, here analyzed like a human creation. This philosophic-artistic investigation shows us religion in its nature of machine, mechanism that man engaged himself to build and elaborate using like materials his fears, hopes and happinesses with the will to explain to himself all the things and control the existence, which, in an overall vision, continues to be elusive.

Sonia Arata