About RES & Constanza Piaggio
The Conatus series, shown here, is a collaborative contemporary art project by Argentinian-based RES & Constanza Piaggio.
Conatus is the tendency to persevere or to keep on existing. It is a fundamental, essential characteristic of all beings. Conatus explores a mode of enquiry into certain assumptions implicit in photography, such as Renaissance perspective, the history of the pose, and what might be termed ‘the pictorial unconscious.’
The Renaissance perspective has been naturalized in Western Art. The general assumption is that human beings are born seeing that way, and as if our gaze weren't built by cultural phenomena. Photography, and especially the act of optical construction implicit in it, is often believed to reveal the only visible reality of the world around us. This series underlines the non-objective nature of every image.
The 'history of the pose’ in the construction of meaning and the pictorial unconscious underlying every photograph are intimately bound to each other. RES & Constanza Piaggio applied these theories to infamous images in art history, changing major or minor details but maintaining an underlying structure. The artists' modern views are revealed through through their "remakes," and, when thinking back to the "original," viewers can appreciate how intonations in an image makes all the difference.
