DIJON.- "FORZA CANI", which could be translated as “Go, dogs, go !” is the performative title that Diego Marcon has chosen for his exhibition at the Consortium Museum, which includes a photograph, ten ceramic sculptures of dead dogs, and a 16mm film projected on a loop.
The exhibition unfolds according to a mechanism with its own logic: a purposeless regularity in which the elements persist, delineate the spaces and voids, perpetually coming back around again.
The title is all the more ironic—or paradoxical—in that it seems to announce a life force whereas these dog carcasses are in fact immobilized, fixed forever in their dual condition as corpses and sculptures—at once realistic and decorative, shiny and polychrome.
The brutal objectification of these adorable domestic creatures is one of the tragi-comic devices of the mis-en-scène, meticulously conceived in terms of rhythm, scansion, and score. Hung on the walls, the sculptures define a space—between image, object, and representation—loaded with a domestic and cultural history (scenes of hunting or sacrifice, anatomical studies, still lifes), cinematic narratives (from Lassie to Rin Tin Tin), and emotional clichés.
Beyond these formal procedures, Marcon places us in an undecidable in-between space, forced to imagine the pathetic, violent, and repetitive vicissitudes that have led to the serial deaths of these poor beasts.
Dead dogs initially appeared in Marcon’s work in 2018, at THEVIEW, a tiny exhibition space located in Sant-Ilario, just above Genoa in Italy, opposite a cemetery overlooking the sea. It was also a time when Marcon was drafting his collection of poems Oh mio cagnetto, 2020, eighty-one nursery rhymes revolving around the missed and mourned figure of a puppy.
Throughout his oeuvre—short films on loop, videos, sculptures, installations—Diego Marcon insists on the pointlessness of finding meaning in his pieces, of identifying with the narratives, the characters, or their inevitably fatal and brutal fate.
In his work, everything always comes down to language, structure, and composition—a structure built on repetition as excess, the driving principle whereby the most disturbing subjects wear themselves out, coil around themselves, where humor inexplicably emerges from a horrific or painful scene.
It is an obsessional humor as in Samuel Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, which places its intermediary figures—neither fully human nor fully inanimate—within a circularity that mimics madness through syntax.
The animatronic mole parents in Dolle (2023) run through an endless list of numbers and additions—mad accountants, blind, anxious and resigned to the asthmatic breath of their sick child right beside them.
The father puppet in the video The Parent’s Room (2021) is singing while admitting the murder of his whole family and his subsequent suicide. Snow keeps on falling and the melody of melancholic horns and woodwinds marks the rhythm for the verbal, hypnotic, and comic music of the narration, trapped in its macabre obsession.
This same morbid precision occurs in the looped video Fritz (2024): a computer-generated young boy hanging from a rope never stops dying. He squirms, clutches his throat, grimaces, all the while singing a yodel in a loop. A slight kick—a heart-wrenchingly precise detail—sets this eternal choreography in motion again. The scene has been emptied of all emotion, the body of substance; only the movement remains.
Children who die, dogs that die are emotional traps Marcon uses to better conceal a dual content that resists language and legibility: the dislocation of human relationships mired in issues of class, alienation and misunderstanding. Empathy—or rather its absence—is the true political aesthetic motif of Marcon’s work, which is only expressed through erasure and suspension.
We get a glimpse of this social isolation in La Gola (2024), where the connection between two lovers wears out through their mutual ignorance; it revolves around gastronomical obsession, madness, physical decay, solitude, and confinement, where nothing—neither in love nor in speech—is ever resolved.
— Stéphanie Moisdon
Diego Marcon studied film (Scuola Civica di Cinema, Televisione e Nuovi Media, Milan, 2006), visual arts, and theater (IUAV University, Venice, 2012).
His work is exhibited internationally (Renaissance Society, Chicago; Kunstalle Wien, Vienne; MADRE Museum, Naples, Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; FID Marseille, Marseille; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore; La Triennale di Milano, Milan, MAXXI Museum, Rome; Centre international d'art et du paysage, Vassivière; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Fondation d'entreprise Ricard, Paris...).
In 2018, Marcon won the Foundation Hernaux Sculpture Award and the MAXXI Bulgari Prize 2018. His films have been screened in film festival including the International Rotterdam Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Paris, Courtisane, Gent, BFI, London, and doclisboa, Lisbon.
