Peeping Tom parapluie (tavares + monnier) was exhibited during the group show 100'000 with parapluie, Matteo Emery, Luisa Figini I Sotterranei dell'arte, Montecarasso (CH), 2009 18.10-15.11.2009 curated by Boris Magrini From the catalogue... presentation text by Ada Cattaneo Though the themes and methods used by Gianluca Monnier (1971) and Andrée Julikà Tavares (1971) may, at first glance, seem very distant, the two artists have found a way to combine their activities, starting in 2008, under the name parapluie. Gianluca Monnier has always concentrated om the visual stimulus to which spectators are continuously subjected by the media and, in particular, by television. Andrée Julikà Tavares, who works above on film and photo productions, reflects instead on the image as a totally private matter. This can be seen in the work "Reelunreel" in which episodes from family life alternate with other, completely extraneous scenes. Thanks to the Insert con of these disturbances, her personal, historically authenthic story is dismembered, becoming like a fictional subject. In I Sotterranei dell'Arte the two proceed along a middle path, while each making their own paricular imprint. "Peeping Tom", in fact, proposes reflection on memory and its mutable interpretations. A woman in a bathing suit is photographed in black and white as she runs toward us, smiling. She is framed, at the sides, by two views of a forest. We might imagine it is the same forest from which the girl has just emerged, but that possibility is quite improbable, given the fact that the snapshot - whose origin is difficult to retrace, at this point - was purchased by the artists at a flea market in Berlin. Yet the mere juxtaposition of two images suffìces to suggest a possible narrative, a path of memory in which they might represent the salient features. An English expression - "peeping Tom", namely a "voyeur. - is the title of the work. But the reference, more specifically, is to the film of the same name by Michael Powell, in which a young filmmaker, after having been subjected to experiments conducted by his father, who put him into frightening situations to observe his reactions, begins to kill, capturing the look of terror of his victims on film. The reminder of this film that even before Antonioni's "Blowup" approached the theme of the subjectivity of the camera and its partiality, alerts us to the hypothesis that the objects shown at I Sotterranei dell'Arte might actually just be traces of a more extensive, different occurrence that what the photo of a pretty girl, flanked by silk stockings and elegant shoes, might suggest. The viewer then realizes that the packaging of the hose has aged, that the high-heeled hoes have a coarse form, and that these supposed tools of seduction wind up looking simply grotesque. The artists, therefore, encourage us to construct a plausible hyoothesis, making use of all the clues available to us. But because they do not allow a single interpretation to assert itself, they keep our awareness focused on the deceptive nature of images.