Mar­co Fusinato
EXPER­I­MEN­TAL HELL (ATMO­SPHÆRAM)

The exhi­bi­tion EXPER­I­MEN­TAL HELL (ATMO­SPHÆRAM) con­sists of three ele­ments. The first is an LP titled ATMO­SPHÆRAM, a solo stu­dio record­ing of Fusinato’s gui­tar work, con­sist­ing of two hyper-focused stud­ies, each of which explores one of two pri­ma­ry ingre­di­ents usu­al­ly com­bined freely in his impro­vi­sa­tions: noise and feed­back. On the first side, we are hurled into a mael­strom of noise, as Fusina­to tor­ments the guitar’s strings to pro­duce a bar­rage of con­stant­ly vary­ing tone and tim­bre. The B side presents an equal­ly sin­gle-mind­ed explo­ration of a sin­gle feed­back tone, push­ing it into micro­ton­al fluc­tu­a­tions and beat­ing pat­terns, let­ting it teeter on the brink of col­lapse, yet nev­er leav­ing it behind. The result is at once relent­less and med­i­ta­tive, inves­ti­gat­ing psy­choa­coustic and spec­tral phe­nom­e­na while using the crush­ing vol­ume and dis­tor­tion of grind­core and metal. 

The LP sleeve fol­lows the design tem­plate Fusina­to uses for all of his solo releas­es: an image from art his­to­ry on the front and one sourced from the mass media on the back, both repro­duced in black and white. On the front we see Artemisia Gentileschi’s 1620 paint­ing of Jael ready­ing her ham­mer to kill the sleep­ing Sis­era by dri­ving a tent peg through his head. On the back, an anony­mous pho­to­graph shows a bat open­ing its mouth in a hideous gri­mace. These images serve as the sources for the ten large screen prints on alu­mini­um that make up the sec­ond com­po­nent of the exhi­bi­tion. Fusina­to approached the print­ing process as action paint­ing, smear­ing the ink in broad swaths, delib­er­ate­ly over-ink­ing, free-pour­ing fix­a­tives… Each image is repeat­ed across five vari­a­tions, its leg­i­bil­i­ty dis­rupt­ed by liq­uid streaks, stains and pools, at times threat­en­ing to dis­solve into the sheen of the alu­mini­um ground or be enveloped in sat­u­rat­ed black. In their exu­ber­ant, ad hoc embrace of the mis­use of print­ing tech­niques, these works call to mind Sig­mar Polke’s chem­i­cal exper­i­ments, as well as sug­gest­ing the degrad­ed mul­ti-gen­er­a­tion pho­to­copy aes­thet­ic of under­ground black met­al acts like Les Légions Noire. 

In the exhibition’s third com­po­nent, Fusina­to per­forms on gui­tar, relat­ed elec­tron­ics and ampli­fi­ca­tion accom­pa­nied by video doc­u­men­ta­tion of the pro­duc­tion of the screen prints, empha­sis­ing the con­nec­tion between the musi­cal and visu­al dimen­sions of the project. Both set up a ten­sion between a tight con­cep­tu­al frame­work and the free impro­vi­sa­tion that occurs with­in it, ​‘exper­i­men­tal’ in the sense that the out­come can­not be known in advance. In both, a ser­i­al form pro­duces not rep­e­ti­tion but vari­a­tion, not for­mal clar­i­ty but dis­or­der. To the vio­lence of the imagery cor­re­sponds the frac­tured inten­si­ty of Fusinato’s noise, while the sus­tained wall of feed­back finds its par­al­lel in the all-envelop­ing void of black ink. 

The images them­selves have an infer­nal air, join­ing the paired art-his­tor­i­cal and anonymous/​news images of Fusinato’s pre­vi­ous record cov­ers and the mas­sive­ly enlarged riot pho­tographs of The Infini­tives to sug­gest a kind of ency­clopaedic vision of human life marked by vio­lence, absur­di­ty and mad­ness. Torn out of their con­texts, the images become ambigu­ous mark­ers of the human con­di­tion. The bat, sug­ges­tive of both the cur­rent pan­dem­ic and vam­pirism, is also, in the famous image from the Capri­chos, Goya’s fig­ure for a mon­strous irra­tional­i­ty. Sim­i­lar­ly, dis­placed from its bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive, Gentileschi’s Jael becomes an image of pure vio­lence, a vio­lence dou­bled by the chaot­ic sur­face of the prints and the explo­sive noise of the accom­pa­ny­ing son­ics. Just as in Goya and Pasoli­ni – two impor­tant touch­stones for Fusina­to – recog­nis­ing the mad­ness of the human con­di­tion becomes an affir­ma­tion, the raw mate­r­i­al for an aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence of unremit­ting intensity. 

Fran­cis Plagne, 2021