ROME.- Eva Hide’s apologue works reveal themselves as plastic still frames. “Frozen” instants extracted from a long movie, as well as from a perturbing and disturbing favolaccia (lit. bad fairy tale) that dares to tell a story, echoing David Lynch’s dreamlike abysses – i.e. recalling the deformed child in Erasehead, or Joseph Merrick’s hurtful, separated, and discriminated world in The Elephant Man. And yet other references draw from Goya’s maniera oscura (obscure manner(s)) – more dysfunctional and horrific than the Quadritos - and from the Expressionist practises in cinema which Eva Hide draws from as a form of natural disposition […].
Their objective depiction of reality makes room to a more perceptive dimension, which is then transfigured by corruption and degradation, as this is what human nature inflicts to itself. In that special unity of place originating from the abstraction of the context of normality, the most delicate creatures in the collective minds - pets, bunnies, kids, flowers and fruits - shipwreck in the storm of psychic neurosis, ambiguous identities, and past violence. Along with them, also daily symbols, objects from joyful moments, the most fragile thoughts and feelings, the reassuring rhetoric illusions also shipwreck. […] “it won’t be all fine,” this is what Eva Hide seems to repeat. Behind that abused face of things, in the obscure labyrinths of our homes, inside of us, as a song says, little and big daily silent crimes happen. Covered up by hypocrisy.
The indissoluble bond between death and sexuality, loneliness and diversity characterizing Eva Hide’s work explains the aggressive and exhibited presence of sexual shape, both masculine and feminine. [Their work exacerbates] objects of desire and pleasure, but also the paroxysmal synecdoche of violence that overwhelms innocence, ambiguous miscommunication, and the hypothalamic chaos. The exposed and caricatural sex gives life to a deliberated pornography seeking liberation utopias, which alludes to the need of love and to the constant danger burdening the innocence of the world.
The static frame, the close-up view, the strong contrasts, the sharp figures with Expressionist cinematic make-up and the oppressing feelings of dwelling with evil deriving from it are all elements that strongly emerge in Eva Hide’s work. Not as a model to look at, but as an elective affinity. This affinity is counterbalanced by yet another distinctive and poetic element, which unmarks its oeuvre and makes it even freer from definition: the sense of game, of transgressive mockery, the shameless courage to practise light irony like a smile - heavy like a pain, but yet able to enlighten obscurity.
Kammerspiel is an invitation to an intimate dialogue to those who are willing to carefully listen to Eva Hide’s Favola Nera da Camera.
Francesco Castellani
Welcome to Eva Hide’s cinema, 2020
The exhibition is on view at
ADA | Via dei Genovesi 35 00153 Roma | through 30 January 2021.
