When commonly referring to overloaded information, to obsessive accumulation of signals in the circuit of production and reception of the visual and textual context, we are generally content with a kind of observation, a confirmation which actually leaves everyone overwhelmed by this sequence nearly uninterrupted in its unfolding and repetition. Indeed a fact by now acquired, but in front of which it seems to be emerging in the work of Bartus Bartolomes, as for natural antidote, a spread of verbal-visual gasps, pictograms on the boundary of the text, which hybridizing in its occurrence builds a language inspired by a visualism not mechanically decodable.
The artist’s iconic message, shaped through disarticulations in ordinariness and predictability of the media message, both technological and not, free a linguistic joyride which does not deny the ritual of the standardized information, but puts it in a condition where it loses its reference code, then it loses its fair pervasiveness and translates it into the actual encounter with the own circuit of the recipient of that message, a receptive humanity that shows itself in its variant both as western alphabetized audiences, and as peripheral ethnic group to linguistic mechanisms typical of post-technological world…
The ludic soul permeating the iconic artist’s writing sweeps like a breath his overcrowded montages, gives them exotic fantasies, transforms the human desires in deformed spatial compartments waiting to trace a spontaneous and direct expression of the self. The color and design coagulate around this sort of writing that, starting from the previous visual poetry, wants to return to a visual word that hybridizing realize itself beyond a precise control, beyond a ‘ search ‘ resulting from the intention that produced it, but a word mark that hovers without reflecting in a semiotic unique referent, so that the language may finally lead us back to what precedes and nourishes it.
By Giovanni Ciucci / Italian writer and artist.
Introduction to the art book Nightmare in New York.
Ravenna, Italy. September 26, 2012
