Danilo Correale

Picket flags, 2010, steel, flagpoles, mixed media, 300x150 cm
Eternal Flame, 2011, 16mm video transferred onto DVD 4:3, 5’ in loop

The world we live in is no doubt overcrowded with images, their propagandistic manipulation and the intermingling of reality and fiction this gives rise to. Danilo Correale’s work aims to explore how these mechanisms produce not only interpretations of reality but, in certain cases, create reality itself rather than simply representing it. Images are actually documents; their function is to inform and educate us about an event that is remote or encapsulate an existing situation. As such, they create filters—both temporary and lasting—through which we perceive reality; yet they can also be used to transform and rectify actual events, stories and fictions dictated by what is politically or ideologically convenient. Images can also be used to rebel against inherited worldviews.

The artist identifies components in the flow and dissemination of images that, considering how they are combined with stories and dialogue, ensure the exercise of power both immaterial and open to ideologies. His appropriation of these images questions the degree of our active or passive participation in their discourse, and examines how these visual codes may be used to activate the potential for revolt. His approach can therefore lead to iconoclasm and desecration of a conceptual or material nature. In the work of Danilo Correale, this last aspect, focusing on rebellion and its reiteration, takes on political and aesthetic value. His is a violent impulse to correct reality and its fictional representation.

In It Will Be Ready for Tomorrow… (2009), a collection of found images are assembled in a unique taxonomy that includes categories such as Science Fiction Archetypes, Iconoclastic Figures, Barricades, the Kodak Photo Industry, Car Bombs and Graffiti. Photography’s iconic nature provides to Correale the metaphorical territory in which to highlight our struggles and constant negotiation with our perceptions of the world. What results is a critical view that unmasks the systems governing reality. His sculptures and photographs represent a series of actions whose aim is to re-evaluate the reliability and the assumed transparency not only of the photographic image, but also of all archives of memory.

Francesco Manacorda

Born 1982, Naples.
He lives and works in Naples, Italy, and in Ghent, Belgium.


Solo show

2010: Mosh Pit Control, Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Naples, Italy

Group shows

2011: Bedtime Stories Badtime stories, Supportico Lopez, Berlin, Germany
2010: Manifesta 8, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Murcia, Spain
Give and Take, Group show of the CSA V Fondazione Ratti, Via Farini, Milan, Italy
Sindrome Italiana, Magasin - Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France
Practicing Memory in a time of an all-encompassing present, Pistoletto Foundation, Biella, Italy
2009: Transit 2, PIST , Istanbul, Event of the 11th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey

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