Detail of CONSTANTINO ZICARELLI’s Dust of men (vertigo records sunset), 2023, sticker (originally graphite on paper). Courtesy the UP Vargas Museum, Metro Manila.
“Fevers are our bodies’ biological defense against illness. They also serve as a metaphor for the calenture of overwrought passion, the heat of the city, or the need to self-regulate and attune to hidden traumas. In “Fever Dream,” viewers experienced artworks that expressed a myriad of feverish states and which sought to generate reflection on how we might learn to acknowledge and tend to our mental febrility.
Passion is the diesel to our existence, propelling us forward to explore our milieu, initiate ideas, and realize relationships. But what happens when the state of the world has saturated our passion, or twisted it into malefic forms? On a faux-wall hung Costantino Zicarelli’s three graphite-on-paper drawings from his Dust of men series(2023), encompassing burning desires such as the phrase “Show No Mercy” in flaming font and the glimpse of sharpened teeth in a half-cracked smile. Yet these passionate symbols are nullified by a forlorn figure on a larger sticker, staring into a spiraling Kubrick-style void. A signifier for life’s beginning and end, the void seems to subdue the figure’s passion, reminding him that all life shall return to dust. ”
Read the full article at Art Asia Pacific.
