by Fabiola Naldi

The many expressive forms that current visual culture offers us are insufficient truly to ‘en-ter’ the artistic development of Andrea Contin. Not even the possible analogies and comparison with many other international artists operating in what we May define as being empathetically close to Andrea Contin’s modu operandi are sufficient.
And it would be reductive to describe one work rather than another, because Andrea Contin chooses the most varied of means (drawing, photography, installation, video, performance) only and exclusively for one motive: to form an experience that finds its maximum presentation in an artistic operation that is constantly changing.
Andrea Contin has a (material and cultural) ability to reflect that is not that of an artist but of an aesthetician who shapes matter in the light of an involving and synaesthetic possibility worthy of a scholar rather than of an artist. The first mediator between the abstract thought and its phenomenonicity is often the artist’s body itself, which bends and transforms itself in name of the medium. Between the conceptual and the ‘worldly’ skin (to use a term dear to aesthetics) resides the intention of the operator; it is transfigured by a constant irony used as primitive language. An irony seen as a rhetorical figure able to maintain a distance from its own operations, and then review them in the light of a renewed awareness.

Andrea Contin asks the user not only to be present but also participant in this process, which can become a drawing, an object, a photograph, a performative action or video. And this same spectator, who has in the meantime become an active agent, discerns the cultural intent, aware of sharing a total involvement with the artist in a sort of bond that is constantly developing.

The works of Andrea Contin have the privilege of not being easily categorisable and usable in many meanings: the task of placing them in one setting rather than another lies solely with he who intends sharing the provocative intent underlying the cultural desire of the artist.
It is not possible to speak of one work rather than another, especially for Andrea Contin. We live in a visual age in which we cannot forget the complexity of our way of life and way of thinking: the artist can do nothing more than aim higher still, perhaps muddling the expressive game amidst a thousand dichotomies and relations, just as occurs in our communal lives.