Independent art curator
When I started my adventure as contemporary art critic and curator, Roxy in the box was already a very well known name within the national contemporary art scene . Her many transformations ,her obsession with aesthetic juxtapositions created by a body over-exposed to the glory of the modern consumerism and by a blaze of kaleidoscopic colors, seemed to announce the final victory of pop culture . In fact a careful study of her art and her far more mature works, highlights that relegate Roxy in the box as a mere Pop artist is a very gross error, just like the one made by a certain criticism that long time ago chained the research of the Independent Group at the same artistic movement. By the end of the 50s the famous British creative team completely reworked the concept of modernism and highlighted the erosion of the difference between high and low culture, today Roxy in the box highlights the end of postmodernism and is deeply immersed in the investigation of cultural layers without any difference. The creative mechanism that drives her search is a re-appropriation of her roots the claim of those social aspects that the society itself accepts without undertake a profound reflection. The ostentation of myth, symbol and mass consumption, dictated by the prevailing market patterns is not only a complaint but the representation of the totality of human experience as it is, with all the its vices and behaviours. Postmodernism has tried to forget the past, eliminating styles and aesthetic and to embrace the American consumerism. Roxy in the box goes far beyond behaviors, and aesthetic aspects related to consumerism because her art is biologically set on overcoming all social and creative limits.
For Roxy in the box techniques and materials represent a way that leads in every possible direction , Her aim is to create cross-disciplinary extreme positions that goes beyond the stylistic elements of avant-garde and artistic practice . Video, painting , performance, installation and sculpture are totally transfigured in their conceptual and aesthetic power, reaching new meanings and significant forms. Through the her creative output , Roxy in the box looks at the man in its struggle to reach its time. This “humanization ” of the time shows the existence of a cyclical and aseptic history, in which the human being is inserted as a standard figure, able to play multiple roles without actually owning one.
In her works the artist embodies these living containers without content , bringing out their uncertainties, their quirks and their obstinacy between being and appearing, in a universe made only of actors and therefore without beholders. Roxy’s in the box is society made of uniform spaces and individualized communities that aspires to globalization but are closed in the lazy freedom of their local sphere, where injustice, division and violence grow.
In the recovery of this local identity, the artist’s research became international, the discovery of a universal society mediated by images. Through the image and its power (fake or true), Roxy in the box has carried out a major survey since his first works. Moving in a world entirely made of images, the artist has played on the hyperproduction and contextualization of the visual forms, one of the few contemporary artists to notice the constant and unconditional abuse of the visual imagery as a life model based on the total alienation and detachment from reality. If most of the artists of the national scene has welcomed the digital revolution as a new way to produce images, Roxy in the box has radically cannibalized today’s technology, making them not the means with which to develop additional images and then new symbols, but the medium through which it is possible to demonstrate the existence of an excessive presence of the technology and the excessive weakness of symbols and images. Although dominated by powerful and ironic aesthetic, each composition is marked by a drama that evokes the passivity of individual, capable of accepting for good anything that looks good. From mockery of the myth the artist reinvent the myth-making which effectively imposes new behaviors and new requirements to the myth itself. The vision of the myth proposed by Roxy in the box amplifies the feeling of transience of human nature and at the same time promises the eternal life. Roxy in the box has always based its research on memory, both personal and collective, but over time this survey has expanded beyond the mere activity of remembering and opened to the study of remembrance as an element of thought, conscience and knowledge.
Micol Di Veroli