Massimo Andrei

Massimo Andrei - Roxy in the Box

Film director, screenwriter, playwright, anthropologist


COLOUR AND PAIN

Roxy in the box. Complex personality. Complicated woman. Busy world. Loughs, fear, getaway, tears, waits, turmoil, food. Also everything.

Practising English, Neapolitan and drawing. Missing gym and introducing cinema, music and advertisement.

Time to time playing with real characters picked up from the most  imaginary pop audience, sometimes she is the one who is the character looking for the author, sometimes videomaker, sometime sculptor, sometime song writer, sometime performer of a simple story, but hard and sad, sometime painter of acrylic on canavas. So many caratheristics. Queen or Elvis right now,  she thinks the present day, she lives the present day, she feels the present day,  but her personal  past tense is really heavy .

She keeps on hand the unconscious, keeping it always present but without being surrealist. Instead, she keeps always forward the history or the news or the events, heeding always the stars, the  “neomelodic singers” and the transvestites, Hitler, drug addicts and the greengrocers, she is still never realist, she seems rather a cartoonist… but what is she? I do not know, I cannot define her… but maybe nobody asks me that… What does it help? Who does it help?  Why?  Maybe she is everything… maybe nothing and that shocks and it impresses. She ingrains. Leaving a track. Thank God.

Unique, rare and painful sensitivity which catchs sides of people and characters, seen with the daily look, that we do not perceive and we could have never perceived in the way in which she translated them in her portraits… Rare and painful sensitivity which tells us and which points out daily (pop)ular life with a kind  of attention which comes from the soul and which has never appeared to us… or it always appears to us but we have never considered them…

Two are the sides of her palace-mind which seem close to me: the colour and the cinema’s angle. She has a completely idealistic relationship with life, which is suggested, dreamt and transformed. It is in the care about the colour and about the sensation… the joy or the game which brings to it… she feels comfortable reinventing the colour of a face or the colour of a scene even if it is copied from the reality… Everything is a symtom of a sensation, her sensation and a colour is never and ever used for story telling…story telling trough colour is not part of her. Photographic.  And in fact she used to use the cinema’s. And I mean for that the position, the framing, the look that she proposes introducing a face, a scene. Sometimes I have had the impression that she could have reported them from a still… which is twist, diagonal, angle… it is a American plan front view, even a cinematographic edit of a circumstance blocked just for one second.

Roxy is curious, she is attentive on what happened around her,  on what happened around us in general… the spark often grows in the social context… and if it does not grow there, the scenario is immediately after closed… it will be included afterwards… the social pain, the social disadvantage, the social contradictions, the tilt… Despite the contemporary artists who look back to the past even using videos and avant-gard’s tecnique… she seems do not have this kind of connection…We almost never read a curious and piercing look to what was done… she does not think as a painter… she does not think as a sculptor… she is in need of actors for her creations, she has to set down them and to direct them as a theatre or movie director. Her figures move as they were in a tv screen… she is in need to dominate new and always shimmering technologies for her art… she displays pressing actuality which continuously tells and sings the daily time… and which is evolving everyday, too… everyday differently…

At the end it is the relationship between a sensitive and exposed figure and a powerful and violent, lovely and passionate city as Naples. Roxy has a visceral relationship with her city and that let her continuously, to suffer, to joy for the moral and changing moods which Naples has, again and again, now with damnation, now with pleasure, now with disgust, now with hugs, with caresses, with slaps, with tears, with missed trains, with steps forwards, with kisses, with strained hair… almost always together.

Massimo Andrei