Text freely taken from the VIRUSGROUP catalogue

Of   Alessio De Cristofaro

Postmodern visual culture, in its particular and highly original Italian declination, is the context in which to historically frame the artists of the Virus Group. I am thinking above all of the moral roots of the experience of the avant-garde theater of Naples in the Seventies, that of the Teatro dei Mutamenti of Antonio Neiwiller, who was a teacher, mentor and close friend for the group. The four artists in the exhibition are rooted in the humus of postmodern art, each with their own personal path and their own times: Giulio Ceraldi, Consuelo Chierici, Stefano De Santis and Giancarlo Savino speak a common language, made of figurativism, stratified memory, dreams and nonconformism. Virus Group feels the responsibility of art as a social and collective mission, in which the individual, apparently caught in the paradox of the isolated and creative ego, only makes sense as a living part of a community. The works of the Virus Group are largely the result of the artists' recent production, created in the climate generated by the first encounter with the Drugstore Museum space, during the very difficult pandemic period. However, here and there, there are also historical works, demonstrating a continuity and unity of language that characterizes all the long artistic experiences of the four protagonists. The recognition of the cultural memory stratified in the works is a necessary operation for their fuller understanding. The references, however, are so many and multiple, that it is not always easy to identify them: sometimes they manifest themselves as quotations, other times as rereadings, still others as deliberate distortions and reinventions. Yet, observing each work carefully, the eye obtains impressions and suggestions capable of transporting it fleetingly in time and space, in an elsewhere that is at the same time here and now, but also over there, and before and after and always.