78 79 stage name Archetypes of the history of art – Flemish and Renaissance in primis – left small studies and votive chapels to go to hourly hotels, suburban peripheries, chat rooms and dark rooms, the new places for sacred aggregation and profane cult. The light is the intimately persuasive small flame of a single candle, lighted by Caravaggio and kept alive by Kubrick. The colours are cold, compound, immersed in a noiseless place, with the exception of our own modified breathing. The refined scenic structure, of which he is master in the composition, is descendant of a cultural eclecticism stained with the deepest and most unconscious introspection. Everything – from the exact disposition of the model, in the economy of the frame, to his pose, deliberately never emphatic – contributes to achieving a compositional rigour that is boosted, in its contradiction, by encrusting multiform cloths on the skin, or by focusing on signs that impinge on it, symbol of other psychological encrusting: a geography of past experiences that, the more it is discovered, the deeper it digs into, as if the mental apparatus in which Sabbagh incarcerates his subjects turned into their accomplice, caustic protection, oil on the wings of an albatross in a black sea. A Stockholm Syndrome to which his models surrender themselves, agreeable to and unconscious of the fact that he is hiding in each of them, as slave to his mind in constant longing for design, devoted to a skin infected with life. However, in spite of the fact that the emotional charge is immediate in front of one of his works, it is necessary to gather the look of those who are able to perceive the shadows in the dark, so as to live Sabbagh’s art as a total experience, as it suits, given the fact that it will never be – and I am sure about this – a mystifying ready-made: Mustafa Sabbagh is the most conceptual figurative artist, and the brightest visionary, when portraying first a languid Madonna, then a livid landscape, in order to create a diptych, the two compositional dimensions of which boost the sense of each other, stories waiting to be told, with any end that the moved viewer decides to write. A scandalous saint like Carmelo Bene once said: “Artists – whenever ethics is also assumed – must stand I wouldn’t say in the odour of sanctity, but at least in filth of sanctity”. Mustafa Sabbagh’s art spreads with sanctifying black the most carnal elements that exist as if they were the most exquisite nectar or the bitterest poison. Beyond an extremely powerful aesthetics, this is where his ethics lies: in his naked and harsh sanctity, Mustafa Sabbagh challenges us to think. «My fetish? The skin, the blue colour of veins, the blood that runs inside veins, and it is life. And I am a life fetishist». MS naked and harsh Skin like a sacred urn, of porcelain and scars, journal of vulnerability exposed to imperfect past experiences, splendid precisely by virtue of their infection. Sensitive skin, sacred book in unique edition. Throbbing veins, tautened nerves, intimate topography of squeezing attires, of tattoos that tell stories, of free chains after imprisonment - or after an extreme game of pleasure. Passage with the world, microchip made impossible to oblivion, Pure Life Skin. In the era of glossy and for this same reason deceitful perfection, the celebration of magnificent imperfection requires another sensitivity, with respect to the status quo of arbitration conformism. We need a refined culture, sworn enemy of the regime information. We need a child Narcissus, with his falling in love with himself beauty, to be able to turn his own fetish into art. Standing in front of an artwork by Mustafa Sabbagh, naked and harsh with its painful power, is like standing equally naked and harsh, helpless and dominated, like coming up against what we used to call fears and which we find out – flushing due to an ill-concealed inheritance – that are actually desires. Sabbagh – with a past as fashion photographer characterised by the intolerance of flattening to a single diktat of pseudo-beauty, and a present as international contemporary artist characterised by rebellion against an establishment devoted to pseudointellectual self-eroticism – is the perfect interpreter of imperfection, having understood – like an alchemist, like a confessor – its secret: “I am different from you, because I have other types of defects”. His art is a direct proof of an oxymoron: iconoclasm through the sacredness of an image, because “it is necessary to know in order to desecrate”. Mustafa Sabbagh masters the language of art with the powerful, and powerfully erotic, charge of someone who knows what he is doing: the history of art revives in his art - in a cigarette that has just been sucked by Saint Sebastian, in the ecstasy of a fetish Ludovica Albertoni, in a Veiled Christ that rises up against the stasis of death. And again, in the Pietà of a man towards a man, of a woman towards a woman, of a man towards a woman; all in all, in the Pietas of humanity towards itself, because contemporary humanity cannot be anything else but de-generate. nome d’arte
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