Concepts such as passion, style, beauty and desire are the substance of the world which Valerio Rocco Orlando puts on stage in his films and video works.
It’s a sentimental, melancholic and seductive world with heterogeneous influences coming from French Nouvelle Vague as well as Caravaggio’s paintings.
Thanks to this peculiar language, Orlando traces an emotional liason between the artist and his subjects, distinguish personalities that, from time to time, reflect the tensions between childhood and adulthood, androgyny and femininity, solitude and relationships.
In the 7-channel video installation The Sentimental Glance (2007) Valerio Rocco Orlando represented, in a passionate way, six young women in a series of (self)portraits, which he has been producing since 2002.
Therefore it’s not about an innocent tribute to the feminine beauty but an intense demonstration of how to look at, and to love an (sub)object is always an attempt to appropriation.

Caroline Corbetta

THE SENTIMENTAL GLANCE

“Each feature, face, being is metamorphosis”.
“The art of the physiognomist consists in interpreting the face of things in movement… Expressions lie in the passageways, in the openings, in being different.
Seeing things in movement means looking in-between, looking inside, penetrating into the crevices, joints and sutures of things, it means burying oneself into them and sucking them up, it means loving things, sinking into them and then re-emerging”.
Rudolf Kassner

An individual’s face tells a story, tracing his own biography. It shows different lines of various origin, be they psychological, pragmatic, historical, social, cultural, physiological or mechanical: it is a slate covered in signs, a true hieroglyph of disparate and concurrent overlapping traces, at times confused and obliterating each other.
A face is metamorphosis, in such as polarity and in-difference of set and mobile features, physiognomy and mimic, static and dynamics. Man’s face on the large screen takes unusual sizes and proportions, it becomes a world and a landscape. Bèla Balàzs writes that seeing an isolated face is like feeling suddenly alone, face to face with that face, and we can create an intimate relationship with him, a previously inconceivable closeness and complicity.
Each face on the screen is always scopic object and subject: it offers something to watch but at the same time a way of watching; it shows a look watching.
Looking at a face indeed does not only mean observing it, but also entering into a set of features, shapes, folds, creases, passageways, openings, lines, intervals, dynamic tensions and rhythms.
As Man cannot be as he seems, simply because he is not limited to being, but keeps on becoming,
transforming himself to state his absolute uniqueness in his being an individual, the face is no longer space, but time. The face is history, or rather it tells its stories; it doesn’t reveal disposition, but its transformations, which are indeed its stories.
It is a physiognomist's duty to read and interpret these stories, he who has distinguishing cognitive skills, a particular prophetic, exceptionally subtle, clear, acute, quick and steady glance. A glance which becomes sensitiveness, intuitive capability, instinct, past experience, natural attraction or antipathy… precisely sentiment. A symbolic glance which derives its key to the invisible world from the visible world.
The soul concentrated in the glance, the soul’s instant glance. According to Schopenhauer, physiognomic thought is “an essential means for the cognition of Man”, given that an individual’s face “says things which are more interesting that those said by his mouth”.
“Omne individuum ineffabile”: in every individual there is something which no words can express, peculiarly his own and therefore unrepeatable.
Authentic physiognomic comprehension thus becomes a “mutuality of glances”: the sense of a face is
generated, time after time, inside a polar-circular relationship of perfect co-resonance established between what objectively appears and the subjective look.
A thesis which is further enforced by the etymological origin of the term “visage or face”, which indicates precisely both vision and sight, and therefore the complete mutuality and interchangeability between the observer and the object being observed.

© Caroline Corbetta, 2007