Tomaso De Luca

The mystery lies in a trunk. It is hoisted on light stands. It could almost evoke a wooden box, the kind used for long transports. Ordinary and familiar, it holds a mysterious vision. It is fleeting. It is caught in a reflection dancing in transparency, just like a ghost. Everything is generated inside the trunk, where the miniature of a room is located.
That maquette is captured by a surveillance camera, the kind that crowds our cities, only to end up transmitted by a banal office screen. It is a theater of rooms and projections that inhabits the trunk to reach us.
This is the key to reading Tomaso De Luca's installation. a complex system that embraces sculpture and video, a compositional game that hybridizes objects but also spaces with an uncertain and indefinable nature. In the trunk, in fact, hides a mechanism inspired by Henry Pepper's mid-nineteenth-century experiments: his optical machine made it possible to materialize holograms with a theatrical trick. De Luca's illusion in Technology for a Ghost also evokes an experiment at the origin of television by John Logie Baird. The Scotsman's invention was the first live “broadcasting” system in the 1920s, a still mechanical prelude to live television broadcasting. The artist thus triggers a reflection on the image. Between illusion and technique, between magic and scientific knowledge, in this system of Chinese boxes the image expands like a virus in society, with its spatio-temporal collapse, from one room to another, from one era to another.

Cristiana Campanini