Costantino Zicarelli's “It was always the devil's turn,
because we are here together and forever,
until the day the world will be on the verge of sorrow”

If—as Tristan Tzara put it in his Dada Manifesto—“thought is made in the mouth,”then certainly Costantino Zicarelli's titles are mouthfuls for a reason: he has many mouths but only one tongue, or many tongues in only one mouth, at the service of multiple thoughts. For here we are presented not the works of Costantino Zicarelli but Zicarelli himself—or more appropriately, Zicarellis themselves in the plural: for to articulate himself he must articulate his multiple selves.

Observe some of his titles: “God created the Devil and the Devil created the most beautiful disasterpiece ever made,” “There is more to life than this great big white world,” “This catastrophe may leave a mark.” Following Tzara's illogic, it would be unfair for the show “It was always the devil's turn, because we are here together and forever, until the day the world will be on the verge of sorrow” to be condensed into a single thought: For this is not one show but many shows. Each canvas contains more than one painting, is Costantino himself, is never Costantino ever.

For he is one and yet isn't one, is one and yet isn't one: Cause Stun Tin Awe is a serial contradiction: Cuss Tan Teen Gnaw is a Deleuzian collective. More aptly, he is a collectivity: all the words of his title/s uttered by a mouth, all his many mouths uttering a single word. In spite of his multiple orifices, his is the potentiality of a Body without Organs—that is, of an entity that remains identity-less although full of himself, or with multiple identities in the process of becoming-Animal: a pack of wolves, a murder of crows and herons.

Or better yet, the murder of the hero. Death to the artist, he seems to exclaim. After all, what you see on the walls is a history that isn't his but merely a prescribed one, a grand narrative-machine to which the Costantino-machine makes a connexion. Conjunctions and convergences. There is no one flow.  Continued...