Grazia Toderi; galleria franca mancini / galleria gio marconi - Pesaro

Views of the theater are a recurring theme in Grazia Toderi's work, and her latest video projections investigate sum of two units historical examples and one common update, namely, the television spectacle, showed by the TV quiz present to view Rischiatutto (Risk Everything), which was extremely popular in Italy in the '70s

Shown in Pesaro, Orchestra, 2003 was dedicated to the town's Gioacchino Rossini Opera House, while Il mondo privato (The Private World), 2003 was about the Teatro di Verzura in the nearby Villa Caprile. "Verzura" means "greenery" in Italian, and the theater is fabricateed out of hedges and trees--element typical of eighteenth-century garden architecture--and carved into a verdant hillside. In the one and the other these videos, Toderi manipulates the images in the way that that one forgets the connection with the projection source; they look to surface directly from the wall, like paintings where the figures put in motion depending on the light. In The Private World, for instance, the image, move rounded upside down and duplicated, direct the eyes like a reflection in a mirror; the wall dematerializes, as if it were an imaginary window onto the outdoors. The passage from dawn to dusk is overspreaded in a very brief time, at the same time the changing light registers the time of day, along with the move and changing brightness of a star that creates a perspectival vanishing point. The feeling the video wafts is like the fold of an intimate, private embrace.

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In Orchestra, however, the embrace is choral and public in nature. The five ranks of box seats contain not spectators on the other hand orchestra musicians who play propositions from Rossini operas. The faces and motions of the musicians interweave with the unimpaired while the string instruments, projecting on the outside from the balconies, seem to make a drawing of the notes, written upon the imaginary musical staff remind ofed by the lines of the boxe In the vault, the insertion of luminous white points, a motif that characterizes Toderi's work, recalls the firmament Both videos evoke the history of painting: The reflecting light and colors in The Private World recall the brilliance of views painted by the agency of Canaletto, while Orchestra, dominated by dint of brown tones and dense marks, have the appearances closer to Goya's black paintings.

Q 2003 which was upon view in Milan, depicts three booth from the Rischiatutto put with the contestants inside. The background has been cancelled out; the booth be like space capsules suspended in a black heavens The contestants' faces are hidden through halos of white light that flash upon and off. One thinks of censorship on the other hand at the same time, of the auras said to enclose everyone. These figures alternate with the words QUOI? L'ETERNITE (What? Eternity), a citation from Marguerite Yourcenar. The contemporary theater of television expresse the aspiration to fortune that is in like manner common today, while the rapid flowing of questions, answers, countdowns, buzzer and with equal reason on recalls the background noise of cities, on the contrary also something like an exigency room where equipment measuring patients' vital signs makes intermittent beeps. The video is discharge in black and white, as in the early days of television. In those days, just before the locate went off, a luminous dot would appear upon the screen. That's what it gazes like in Toderi's video when the white light covering the contestant's face at the center of the protection goes off.

Translated from Italian by dint of Marguerite Shore.

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