In the work of Daniele Innamorato and Cindy Jansen, what is particularly compelling is their attempt to explore how to bring uncomfortable realities to light by turning them into art. The debate is ongoing and would be extensive, but the main necessity remains establishing, as the only fixed point, that art and images can never be and must never be limited.
Daniele Innamorato lives part of his life immersed in and narrating aspects of a marginalized society—a bitter consequence and logical complement to the one depicted in Jansen’s videos. Their works elevate to the level of art themes such as drugs, drug addiction, sex, homosexuality, and trans identity. In the context of this exhibition, what unites the two artists is a narrative attitude, a desire to tell stories realistically and without interpretative filters—at least on the surface—about their own lives and the lives of people who have embraced the style and identity of transvestism, excess, and prostitution.
Daniele Innamorato structures the photographic account of a night spent with two transvestite friends like a continuous cinematic shot, deconstructed within the exhibition into many single frames, referencing and feeling at ease among the best contemporary photographic traditions, from Nan Goldin to Wolfgang Tillmans to Jack Pierson, and along the way crossing paths with the work of Terry Richardson, Harmony Korine, and Bruce Labruce. From the interior of their home to the streets, he follows them through their nighttime performances, as they joke, argue, make love, get high, and work as prostitutes.
In the case of Cindy Jansen’s video work, the subjects are also trans individuals, but this time they are not friends of the artist. The footage is or appears to be secretly captured in the night of a marginalized society, showing reactions, derision, complicity—with passersby, potential clients, and ordinary drivers.
Knowledge as a path to awareness: this is the process that the work of these two artists enacts on our psyche. Shifting the most suspect aspects of our thoughts from imagination to cognition. The reaction provoked by certain images probes our unconscious and reveals our hidden thoughts, repressed ideas—it helps us understand how far we accept and where we resist. It’s a lesson, an inner course that helps us understand ourselves, but it must (and can) also help us push further our level of understanding and tolerance toward a world we cannot ignore.
There is no moralistic or critical intent in these kinds of images—only the desire to narrate aspects of existence from another angle, one that is more relaxed and serene, not bigoted, one that cannot be ignored nor excessively emphasized, but only lived with naturalness, in the hope of stimulating further reflection on concepts such as freedom, identity, tolerance, and participation.