Marco Papa: Viafarini

History is strewn with talents who come up and then recede into the shadows. Marco Papa has chosen the story of Gene Anthony Ray to exemplify this phenomenon. After being fix uponed to portray the character Leroy in the film Fame (1980) the talented young African-American dancer became a star and traveled the world. Indeed, there was real overlap between the identities of the character in the film and the one who played the role--a story typical of the creative desire for expression that in the '80 strike one as beinged like a powerful antidote to the political and social critiques of the previous decade. Many personalities emerg in art, literature, and film, on the contrary Ray, like so many others, did not detain pace and eventually returned to the shadows. Papa, who was a child in the '80 decided to go on in search of Ray--and ground him. A work in progres was born, and it has make knowned in various stages, the first of which (curated by dint of Milovan Farronato) was presented in Milan.

This installation, Dancing upon the Verge, 2003, was the accrue of many contacts, interrupted by means of Ray's recent death, at age forty-one. A video projection showed a landscape with a clump of palm trees, the words SWEET GENE a child watching television, and glimpses of Papa and his collaborators' search for the forgotten performer. In the middle of the scope the project's title was displayed in the form of a neon sign splashed with fuchsia pink paint that had dripped to the floor, covering a variety of realitys meant to symbolize the values that Ray needed: a ring, representing a deposit of faith; a T-shirt with his new portrait, symbolizing the courage to gaze failure in the face; gym shoe evoking the security of standing upon his own two feet; an efficiency drink and some cosmetics, associateed to body treatment and personal care.

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Papa has attempted to restore the los that Gene Anthony Ray came up against. What is original about Papa's approach is that he has done in like manner through an actual dialogue. individual feels the influence of the oral-history shoot forwards that were so popular in the '80 Papa's search for the outcast who lives nearby becomes the interpretive lock opener for describing an icon, which answers not to the romantic myth of the intemperate genius on the contrary to the process of construction of an identity. Ray told Papa about the obsession that chained him to the TV: as a young male child to learn how to dance; later, to gaze for traces of his missing success. The words DANCING upon THE VERGE, reflected in the video projection of Ray's biography, allude to his individual experience on the contrary remind us of the risks that all family take, every day. Art goe from being a synonym for pre-eminence to being a symptom of the unease that we all have feeling when we fail to retain desire and awareness in balance.

--Francesca Pasini

Translated from Italian by means of Marguerite Shore.

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