Singer: Gennaro De Masco
Bodies with uncontrolled designations, registered brands recording all the fetishist chaos, super-pop scenes between social roles and the multiplication of identities … Roxy in the box glides along supermarket shelves, in bathroom cabinets, in front of kitchen shelves, inside bulging drawers and chests of drawers and boxes and small cases which reveal evocative scenarios in the wings. Above all, however, she glides along the bookcases of neurosis, through those gnarled spaces of solitude, those shadowy places of innermost anxiety, frequently unveiled by an invisible mirror which filters and completely changes the creative stories. Roxy’s universe is colourful, fetishist, impossible to circumscribe in a single language. The artist uses Nutella, Soflan, Active Tabs, Kitekat and other products which denote the idiosyncrasies, weaknesses, twitches and passions of a person who walks softly in the midst of urban madness. We envisage her faced with the many brands which become the story of a person, their identifying stamp, the anomalous confessional of private events discovered bit by bit, one moment at a time. Each project is thus transformed into a visual tale where painting is linked to other elements which vary according to specific needs. Pictorial paintings, light-boxes, installation objects, real fragments, costumes, music: multiple visions to encapsulate the personality of each character, providing the attire and context most appropriate to each protagonist in the stage. Psicosomaro takes its cue from Red Donkey Beer Femmenella takes its cue from Roxized Nutella Deep End takes its cue from Roxy WC Active Tabs Strawberry Juice takes its cue from Roxy Blue strawberry juice Kitakkat takes its cue from a truly Roxized cat food. Five stories about five products that have invaded the supermarkets, small shops and nomad of urban imagination. Each brand has something personal about it describing an autobiographic counterpoint which changes the very story of the brand, and brings to lights its innermost contents and those sensitive private affairs that humanize the objects. Psicosomaro: a pictorial painting, five light-boxes, a bench with five pacifiers/dummies … Femmenella: a pictorial painting, five light-boxes… Deep End: a pictorial painting, some boxes which turn into lamps, a toilette which projects a video from the bottom of the bowl … … Strawberry Juice: a pictorial painting, two light boxes… Kitakkat: a light-box, cat bowls containing sweets, a video … At the gallery, we will see the five installations described above, while a few days before the exhibition, there will be a performance which will catapult the Roman public right into the Kitakkat of the title. We will leave the surprise to be discovered during the evening with a Stop at XXXX. After all, Roxy is just like that; mysterious and radical, complex beyond the mere semblance of the brands and bodies. She identifies mimetically with the products she selects and re-elaborates as she enters into their social notoriety only to turn them completely up-side-down with a cynical and spectacular attention-seeking attitude that is the result of her keen intelligence and visual intuition, of her sense of riony and in-depth culture of our increasingly pop imagination. The brands are transformed into persons while persons become the content and containers. …
Gianluca Marziani
Kitakkat Mostra Roma 2004
Backstage Videoclip 2004
Kitakkat al Pan di Napoli 2008 
The Enterprise of Art
Curated by Julia Draganovic Pan Palazzo delle Arti Napoli
Kitakkat by Roxy in the Box represents a self-effacing example and, therefore, turning upside down, the conventional attitude towards the market. The Neapolitan artist’s installation brings together a large painting which represent the artista as a spokesperson of the cat food brand with a video presented in series format: six plasma screens make up a frame for the piece with the dimension of a promotional poster, in the video the artist acts out the part of a frazzled supermarket customer: a woman dressed in a flashy baroque outfit runs breathlessly through the aisles of the supermarket, obviously without direction but very conscious of the video camera. It is the sale that counts – the sale of what?, though? – in Neapolitan dialect the allusion to cat food in the title Kitakkat asks the nagging question, not just only for emerging artists, “Chi ti compra?” – “Who’s buying you?”. Indeed, Roxy in the Box’s video installation puts not just the identty of the buyer into question but the object itself: is it the work or the artist?
Julia Draganovic
kitakkat
acrylic on canvas
180cm x 130cm
2008
“ I love everything that is wrapped food: I find it magical that flavours can come out from a tin or a box.” Perhaps it is for this reason that Roxy in the Box, in real life Rosaria Bosso, presents herself to the public with all of her extraordinary explosive charge, inviting and appetising, just like the content of one of her boxes. Multi-coloured, ironic, desecrating and neurotic, Roxy, obsessed by anxieties which soon reveal themselves to be the same ones that plague our entire society, faces them one by one with the help of one of the wigs she collects, her fetishist accessories or a gothic Lolita get up, and in a jolly game of role switching, in identifying with object obsession, she owns it, turns it inside out and subverts its fundamental principle, denatures it, derides it. This is what happens in Kitakkat, a surreal video shot among the aisles of a provincial supermarket and stars the artista s she runs followed by her little daily neurosis: the brand names that have invaded our definitely pop collective imagination become its absolute stars. This i show a famous cat food brand gets Roxized, as the artist hersels suggest, and in the battle against homogenization, becomes a caricature of herself being branded by a name which will sign – ingloriously – her destiny. The works that make up Roxy in the Box have titles which are vital to the understanding and synopsis of the work itself. Kitakkat together with Io-mò (which rhymes with the famous yoghurt) and Martiri ( a parody on the famous drink) are only examples. With her captivating word plays roxy puts her audience, condemned to following false needs and true labels, on guard against stereotypical considerations and conventional attitudes, inviting it with the scratching notes of Depeche Mode, “no hidden catch, no strings attached…”, to take an active part of the life of the brand with an approach no longer just critical – as that suggested by Naomi Klein in her celebrated work No Logo but desecrating, aimed at making the system which creates myths ridiculous, with irony and disenchantment. Sarah Galmuzzi