The work exhibited by Angelo Titonel at 54th Venice Biennale takes a deep look at our contemporary world, carrying on with the subject explored in the series Playing skittles, shown at the recent personal exhibition at Antichi Magazzini del Sale in Siena (Italy).
Maternity (2011, oil on wood and lambda print, 145 by 200 cm) deals with a central theme which has always been present in art, starting from the prehistoric Venus figurines or the Mater Matuta of ancient times, whose basic content - i.e. life - is about the present but also about the idea that a society has of a project for the future of Mankind.
The work has a double identity. A first image, which stands out from the dark background, rendered by Titonel with the great craftsmanship of his oil painting, is stripped of her clothes which reveal with harsh objectivity the shapes which ambiguously blend natural elements and artificial ones: the mother's sweet face is devoid of feminine hair and on the other hand there are prosthetic legs, the puppet-child/plump child, the absence of breast, the colours with "soft" shades.
Along with this maternity there is another one on a white background, looking exactly the same because the protagonists are the same, in the same position, but, actually, it is extremely different both for its technique in lambda print and for its meaning.
In fact, while the shot in the abstract creates a superficial reproduction of the objective image which can be a means to document a realistic dimension of life, in this work of Angelo Titonel, on the contrary, it is a photographic image "in negative" which wants to lead to a new introspective, spiritual reading/interpretation.
Art, according to Angelo Titonel, is a search of the "soul", though with all its problems and the limits which the present shows, it is an invitation to think.

July 2011, Marta Montanari (Translation: A. Venturoli).