Hollywood | Mestre

HOLLYWOOD. La Fabbrica dello Spettacolo

Group Show

November 26 - December 12, 2005 | Galleria Contemporaneo, Mestre

Curated by Interno3 & Andrea Morucchio

catalog with texts by: Saramicol Viscardi, Marcello Tari, Marco Baravalle, Massimo De Bortoli, Andrea Morucchio

Created for the group exhibition HOLLYWOOD. La Fabbrica dello Spettacolo / The Spectacle Factory at Galleria Contemporaneo, Mestre (2005)—a project co-curated by Andrea Morucchio with Interno3— THE MAIN SHOW marks a pivotal moment in Morucchio’s artistic trajectory. For the first time, the artist reactivates a sequence of black-and-white photographs originally taken in 1994 at the Gipsoteca di Possagno. Printed from analog medium-format negatives, these images—rooted in Morucchio’s professional photographic practice throughout the 1990s—are recontextualized as a contemporary artwork, transforming “pure photography” into a speculative reflection on image, perception, and the language of contemporary art.

The triptych presents a lateral sequence of three photographs of Antonio Canova’s Pietà, each captured from a slightly different angle. At once austere and unsettling, the work engages a double genealogy: on one side, the persistence of sacred archetypes within Western art; on the other, their translation into the cinematic and media imaginaries of modernity. The plaster casts of Canova’s sculptures, punctuated by small bronze reference points—technical devices used to transfer canonical proportions—become metaphors of measurement and codification, an abstract matrix of beauty that extends from neoclassical idealism into the visual paradigms of the contemporary spectacle.

Morucchio’s intervention resonates with Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the reproducibility of the artwork: images once anchored in cult value have migrated into the sphere of exhibition and circulation, where their authority is reframed by the logic of mass media. The Pietà itself belongs to a lineage of what Aby Warburg defined as Pathosformeln—condensed, repeatable figures that transmit emotional intensity across time and media. From Pasolini’s ascetic realism to Mel Gibson’s dramatic excess, the image of the dead Son cradled by the Mother recurs as a visual formula continually recharged with affect and meaning.

By situating Canova’s Pietà within the conceptual horizon of Hollywood—understood not merely as an industry but, in Guy Debord’s terms, as a société du spectacle—Morucchio reveals the deep affinities between sacred representation and cinematic spectacle. Both rely on visual strategies of persuasion, pathos, and collective identification.

Formally,THE MAIN SHOW activates what might be called a proto-cinematic effect: the slight shifts in viewpoint between the three images compel the viewer’s gaze into a horizontal oscillation, an attempt to resolve subtle differences. This lateral movement evokes the very principle of film—the illusion of motion born from still frames. Yet here, the motion is perceptual rather than mechanical, generated by the viewer’s own act of looking. Through this device, Morucchio breaks the traditional stasis of the Pietà, reanimating it as a time-based image poised between photography and cinema, between devotional icon and media spectacle.

Ultimately,THE MAIN SHOW functions as both homage and critical displacement. It situates the neoclassical sacred form within the apparatus of contemporary visual culture, exposing the continuity between religious archetypes and the spectacle industry. Morucchio’s work invites us to reconsider how affect, pathos, and beauty are codified, reproduced, and re-enacted across the shifting media of history.