Making Faces / still

With the series of portraits Making Faces together with those of the >> Fantastic Portrait prints and >> Fantastic Portrait NFT series Morucchio expresses a series of works that are the result of a research that, while remaining in a "figurative" sphere, moves away from a simple aesthetic approach as an end in itself to use a language that is certainly more original and the bearer of concepts and contents that characterize any artistic expression that qualifies as contemporary.

The Making Faces stills are characterized by the contrast between the suave joyful appearance of the polyhedral color fields of the butterfly wing pieces that in varying their arrangement give shape to the dynamic flow of faces of the portrayed subjects who appear hilarious, bewildered, stunned somehow embodying the existential drama and anguish of contemporary man between wars economic and environmental crises and social control. 

But they also express and convey astonishment, irony, and cynicism with respect to mainstream media narratives lacking in critique and subjugated to the will and control of Western governments that just a few years ago could have been part of a plot in a novel or film of a dystopian society of the distant future.

The project thus consists of a parade of faces belonging to real people to whom Morucchio has given biblical names. A series of people who have not been trapped by the unified-network propaganda narrative of the new neoliberal globalist system and who express with sequences of theatrical facial expressions a reaction to issues such as transhumanism, gender fluidicity, the biosecuritarian paradigm, surveillance capitalism etc; All issues that in the very last few years have accelerated in the ways in which Power is implementing and imposing them on populations.

These thirty-three individuals represent - by their facial mimicry reaction - that minority percentage of the population that has not fallen victim to an extremely pervasive cultural informational conditioning more incisive than an autocratic system in which the values of freedom, democracy, peace, security and equality promoted by the current dominant system express in truth, as in Orwellian neo-language, exactly their opposite. 

Giorgio Agamben, one of the most prominent contemporary Italian philosophers - whom I had the opportunity to mention already in the introductory text of the >> Laudes Regiae project in 2007 - recently wrote: "If historians someday investigate what happened under the cover of the pandemic, it will turn out, I believe, that our society had perhaps never before reached such an extreme degree of cruelty, irresponsibility, and, at the same time, disintegration. An entire society-that has become accomplice to a crime whose perpetrator is absent. A society of accomplices is more oppressive and suppressive than any dictatorship, because those who do not participate in complicity - the non-complice - are purely and simply excluded from the social pact."