HISPANICS. AN INCURSION INTO THE HUMAN LANDASCAPE

Luca Sacchetti's works arise from enthusiasm, attentive gaze and research. Unlike other artists who prefer to dive inside themselves and find the source of their inspiration there, Sacchetti chooses to look around him, question everyday life and question the complex world that surrounds us.In this process, his trips to Latin America were very important. There he found situations that seduced him, people with very unique characteristics, ways of life and thought that encouraged him to meditate and create. Thus began his journey through a human landscape that naturally took shape in paintings and photographs. This journey became more and more intense until arriving at the very heart of faces and gestures. From that moment on, one of the great challenges of his production has been the task of transmitting the particular aspect of a specific social aspect. This is how his most recent series was born, which bears the general title, Hispanos (2021). To account for the complexity of his object of study, Sacchetti creates installations that combine pictorial portraits, photographs printed on aluminum and found metal sheets. Neither a unitary medium, nor a unitary image, seem capable of capturing the various approaches required by the visual and conceptual universe that it wants to bear witness to. The elements that make up these facilities enhance each other to the point that it is not possible to consider them separately. This is how the artist understands it, who refuses to disarm the dialogues that arise from their sharing. Consequently, Luca Sacchetti's installations display a fragmentary writing that slowly unfolds as the elements that make it up interact with each other. Hence, each of them requires a longer reading time than is usual in contemporary art. It is not enough to grasp the images or recognize the events that are represented there; you also have to establish relationships that reveal your most intimate ties. For Sacchetti, the fragmentary gaze is typical of our current way to live with information networks. We live surrounded by data and knowledge that flow constantly with no desire for convergence. This determines that even our approach to the classical, the homogeneous and the harmonious is produced in those terms. Today it is difficult for us to accept the unity proposed by the great masters of the history of art. Contemporaneity pushes us to unravel that past, to approach it with different intensities, to disarm its mechanisms challenging the authority of its apparent indivisible power.mThis observation is made present in a series in which Sacchetti appropriates fragments of imposing murals by mexicans masters like José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera. With his own gestures, which do not try to copy his referents but rather quote them gently, the Italian artist highlights details that interest him, on which he writes phrases that refer to inequities and conflicts in the current world: "I don't care about normality", “The illusion of control”, “Freedom from the chains of social conditioning”, “The discreet charm of money”. At the same time, he identifies in these murals certain social statements and attitudes that embody or promote inequalities that persist to this day, such as the arrogant, the indifferent, the outcast, high society, etc. But his interest in muralism does not stop at visual appropriation. Sacchetti recovers the narrative character of this practice that was aimed at a broad, non-specialized public, and that did not require the institutional framework of museums for its full understanding. Hence his rescue of simple, easily identifiable images that promote a story open to public participation. Photography is an ideal ally in this task; through it, the artist captures emblematic moments, such as a celebration of the deads in Mexico, the hard work of miners in Bolivia or a birthday celebration in Guatemala. His other ally is the pictorial portrait that allows him to reproduce faces of great intensity, in which viewers find a mirror that gives them back a part – recognizable or not – of their own world.In this sense, the work of Luca Sacchetti shows a clear humanist perspective. The point of view that arises from a position outsaide the world that is not only visual, but also deeply ethical and existential.

Rodrigo alonso