TORTURE
Torture gathers the work of the last three years of artist Rosy Rox. From the very start, women and their social condition have been the kernel of her research actually ending up in a study of the forms of “social prison” in which the artist becomes the subject-object of her own works. By means of captivating aesthetics, that could however be defined as aesthetics of terror, Rox stages theatrical situations in which the whole space is used, according to the teachings of Kabakov, and the very body of the artist is as an actor. The settings of “Rame Rapiscimi” and “Stark Rot”, though the use of colour, become timeless metaphysical spaces in which the warm light generated by the wire and the red colour draw the viewer, at once active and passive protagonist, into prison, a place hanging between real and imaginary. A woman-doll-object that seeks reassurance through the pairing of violence and seduction, Rosy Rox disturbingly uses jewelry-weapons to impose herself in a world dominated by male chauvinistic reasoning. It’d be anachronistic however to link her work to a feminist thread, as it preaches, certainly in a shocking way, the empowering of women through their natural characteristics: beauty and sensuality. The frailty intrinsic to the female condition is mirrored in her choice of material: crystal has become in the latest pieces a preferred medium due to its dichotomy between preciosity and fragility. The whip, in its countless variations from the cat o’ nine tails to the medieval flail, turns into monumental sculptures filled with erotic masochistic meanings, of shiny looks and surely glamorous, but always instruments of torture; works in which the tactility and the craftsmanship still have a fundamental value. Even a lotus flower, par excellence a symbol of beauty that blooms out of mud and ugliness, becomes a dangerous weapon. Its shinning steel petals turn out to be sharp blades ready to defend nature from human interference, playing on the unconscious aesthetic similarity between the flower and a ninja shuriken.