Maurizio Vetrugno – La Voie Lactée

La Voie Lactée at Biasa Art, Ubud is Italian artist Maurizio Vetrugno’s second solo exhibition in Bali. It features twelve masks from his ongoing series Quote Celesti (Celestial Altitudes) and two handmade silk embroideries.

The title of the exhibition is taken from La Voie Lactée, a film noir by Luis Buñuel about a network of pilgrimage routes to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. In the movie two French drifters decide to take the route from Paris. Their path is dotted with unexpected encounters of people and visions, creating a chain of events in a surreal atmosphere that leaves the spectator with multiple questions.

Maurizio Vetrugno (b. 1957) started the Quote Celesti mask series in 2023. His process of ‘casting’ the subject-characters for the masks resembles the approach of a movie director or puppet master (dalang). Each mask is created to animate a famous personality after a particular photograph, which the artist over the years has carefully selected from his compiled image collection. Together, they implicate a certain plot that manoeuvres on different timelines; inhabit a world where different social and professional backgrounds come face to face. Vetrugno’s masks exist in a zone, where reality and the surrealism of life are starting to blend almost in a way a double exposure would. Representing famous pop icons, exemplary rebels, exceptional models, unheard of prophets, early Dadaists and figures of simple and pure vanity, the masks make the thin and oscillating line between the concepts of private and public life suddenly appear.

In their particularity of the ‘snap’ moment – the visual appearance of the instant of photography – Vetrugno’s masks recall the gravitas of the old masters’ portraiture as a genre; Frans Hals’ and Caravaggio’s paintings come to mind. From a more contemporary perspective, the ongoing series constitutes a social theater that emulates the anti-tradition of avant-garde theatre or even the active pulse of Andy Warhol’s Factory and its continuation on the New York disco scene.

The embroideries in this soloshow are commissioned by the artist and executed by artisans in Laos. They refer to original wear from the ’60s and ’70s. Interstellar Reflexology specifically references the creations of Robert Gordon (Bob) Mackie (*1939), an American fashion designer reknown for his costume work for entertainment icons such as Cher, Elton John, Tina Turner and the likes.

The exhibition La Voie Lactée continues Maurizio Vetrugno’s investigation of Western and Eastern practices through what he calls a “stream of image consciousness and word cut ups.” He directs elements, archaic techniques and objects from different cultures in order to create artworks that stop us in our tracks by transcending what we think we have seen before and therefore are familiar with.