The exhibition presents the recent acquisitions by the Foundation for Modern and Contemporary Art CRT of the video Appendix for a supplication , 1972, by Ketty La Rocca , of his artist books with some graphic and photographic works created between 1970 and 1974.
Appendice per una supplica is one of the first artist videos made in Italy, shot in collaboration with Gerry Schum and presented at the 36th Venice Biennale in the "Video-tapes" section, alongside the exhibition of artist's books " The book as a place of research ”, curated by Renato Barilli and Daniela Palazzoli, in which Ketty La Rocca's In Principle Erat, 1972, was presented.
In both works the gestures of the hands are central but, differently from what they were doing in those years, in different ways, artists such as Bruno Munari and Alighiero Boetti , Ketty La Rocca does not respect the codes of communication, does not use the language of signs, nor the traditional expressiveness of Italian gestures . It frees the gesture of the hands from any preordained significance and tries to conquer a new freedom in the image, an unprecedented expressive force, placing it in a pre-linguistic void as in the case of the video, or by combining it with short texts that are deliberately meaningless as in the book In the beginning erat.
It is no coincidence that the title of that book evokes the epiphany of the logos in John's Gospel, that auroral instant of meaning in which the verb appears as the fullness of being, still uncorrupted by the codes of language, not yet diminished by conventions and by false correspondences of languages and lexicons.
In the same 1972, in works such as the Untitled triptych, present in the exhibition, the artist is replacing the profiles of photographic images with a minute calligraphy of phrases devoid of any intelligible meaning, so much so that the writing, orphaned of content, seems to surrender to its own linear beauty and melt into design. With the drawing Ketty La Rocca is recovering a new possession of images, even those of the noblest history of art, completely opposite to their media consumption. In years in which conceptual art was nourished by bloodless tautological games between photography and texts, La Rocca regenerates the visual power of word and image through an unusual existential charge that explodes in the obsessive repetition of the word You on the photographic surface: it is the you of the observer who must respond to the artist's ego so that the two halves of the symbol reunite, so that images and words return to mean.