“First Person Plural,” Patrick Tuttofuoco’s latest exhibition, conveys an unresolved sense of unease that seems prompted by the artist’s recent move to Berlin. While looking at his new works, viewers might also feel uneasy (and a sense of the uncanny): The show offers multiple visages and body parts, including fiberglass and plastic faces, ski masks plastered in acidic colors, and casts of hands that hang from stylized trees. The exhibition stands in stark contrast to Tuttofuoco’s previous works, such as Revolving Landscape, 2006, for which he traveled around the world with three collaborators in eighty days. Here, Tuttofuoco takes Cameron West’s 1999 book as a starting point for visualizing not just identity disorders but also the effects of groups and collectives on the individual. After years spent portraying cities and their networks, Tuttofuoco now presents himself as a totality of flashbacks. Is the disintegration of community related to the disintegration of the ego? Among the floating masks and objects in his show, Gino De Dominicis and Bruce Nauman come to mind, as well as Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author and that writer’s interest in the work of psychologist Alfred Binet.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
