Alta Borghesia e desideri erotici Max Hamlet Sauvage, Mostra personale

In April, the cultural meetings at La Casa degli Artisti in Gallipoli, the residence of artist Giorgio De Cesario, continue. This time, it hosts the friend and esteemed colleague Max Hamlet Sauvage, a versatile conceptual surrealist of international fame, originally from Gallipoli but with a cosmopolitan education. He has traveled extensively around the world, attending some of the most prestigious art schools and meeting the most prominent artists and critics of the 20th and New Millennium.

The exhibition, presented by the well-known writer Maurizio Nocera and consisting of 25 works, is titled "The Hybrid Metropolitan Universe that Investigates the Fate of Man": a lengthy title but one that encapsulates the artist's personal message in a few meaningful words. The exhibited works are a narrative sequence in which one can recognize themes dear to Max Hamlet Sauvage: scantily clad female figures offering themselves to hybrid males whose bird or animal heads suggest the "animality" hiding behind harmonious elegance.

In this regard, art historian Enrico Crispolti commented: "It is an explicitly perverse world, treated with irony, satire, and sarcasm, and with the amusement of a biting spirit that condemns those who commercialize the female image and always denounces the individual and collective sexual neuroses that today have become gossip and political news."

From his works, one can also see the critique of the opulent western society, combined with a modern fable represented, in the style of Max Ernst, "by birds that live bourgeois lives and share erotic needs and desires with the upper bourgeoisie" (Giorgio Di Genova, art critic, and historian).

Max Hamlet also questions what the fate of man could be, considering the irreversible degradation of human consciousness, the power of multinationals, and the increasing domination of some states over others. He questions all this, and Maurizio Nocera concludes: "His truly seems like a zoo of human figures who, in the face of the collapse of humanity's conscience and the violence of powers, hope for a future of orgasmic joy and liberating trance."

Notably, the distinguished Philippe Daverio, speaking of Max Hamlet, defined him as a "provocative man" who challenges consciences with uncomfortable metaphors of social denunciation but full of the pathos of an ironic and mocking genius loci.

All of this is narrated in the works included in the current exhibition, curated by Prof. Orsolina Fontò and Maria Cristina Maritati, with the collaboration of CittadinanzAttiva, the Gallipoli assembly, and the "La Fenice" Circle.

Maria Cristina Maritati