foreword

Deadly Sins. A Recurring Iconography

words by Iggy Passenger

Although paired with theology, the Deadly Sins are somehow a catalogue of human weaknesses.

We define "sins" as exaggerated behaviours upon established morale, whose seriousness is related to how much damage they cause to the individual and the community.

Without any doubt, the immediate referral is to that sort of initiation named 'Divine Comedy' by Dante Alighieri in the XIV century. To visually describe the distance between Inferno - Hell - and Eden, Dante used a series of juxtaposed rings, with each ring expressing one of the seven types of sin. The more serious the sin, the further away from Paradise.

However, before and after Dante, every age produced its own vision of the Deadly Sins. No less notorious is Hieronymus Bosch's representation, who uses grotesque trickery to raise a sort of transference between sin and sinner by the viewer; the theological abstraction - still prevailing in the Divine Comedy - gives way to a physiognomic of the sin destined to mark all Western imaginary. Bosch's figurative vision is a successful saga using a new language to reveal the human condition under high morality's vigilant eye.

During the Enlightenment age, the difference between sins and virtues started to lose importance as integrity and sins contribute to society's material development in industrial, commercial, and economic areas. However, after this period, the sins are still traceable in Immanuel Kant's works, who interprets them as an expression of human typology and an integral part of one's behaviour. Later, in the 1800s, there came about a great many essays on the Deadly Sins with them becoming a vastly interesting topic across moral philosophy, human psychology and theology circles.

An updated version - even darker than Bosch's - comes by Otto Dix in 1933. It is an allegorical painting symbolising the political status in Germany during Hitler's rise to power. Here the artist construes the events through the same artifice as the Flemish masters: Envy, who is riding on Greed's shoulders, is wearing a mask with Adolf Hitler's resemblance. The image depicts a newborn society, barbarian and savage in its misery; a nightmare that will be hard to wake up from.

Why a photographic project about the Deadly Sins?

Photography has been formerly used to declare "true and real" some historical events through visual means. In time, it matured into the ability to show everyday life in a more personal way. Eventually, photography revealed the true soul of reality that is intrinsic to every human statement: the interpretation.

It seems that the Seven Deadly Sins became more and more a sort of lens used to show - or interpret - the human condition of the times. A guiding tool that, washed out from any religious implication, works as an archetypal landmark of the loss of meanings in contemporary society.

To discuss sin - what it means in our age - presumes the immanence of the sin itself, which, although secularised, seems to be unavoidable even in the most tolerant of societies. What is more interesting than whether or not you accept the existence of sin or not - everybody could fabricate new sins at his own leisure - is to understand that the "Deadly Sins" are intrinsic traits of human nature and not pathologies. With this view, the Seven Sins can be used to depict multiple nuances of human fascinations, a sort of primary colour chart useful to compliment a richer chromatic palette.

From this hypothesis, Marco Joe Fazio and his team produced seven sets to depict the human "comedy." Therefore, the stylistic research team used this grid as an 'interpretation register', which is not intended as a restraint to experimentation… Quite the opposite, it is a challenge! Personal interpretation is often a perfidious terrain, a mermaid seducing the artist.

Here the challenge was to be creatively engaged within a grounded organisation. Marco founded the basis of a choral work as if it were building a cathedral; he managed the synergy between the collaborators, letting them feel free to express themselves while being well-directed and harmonised through his constant input and feedback.

The final shot is the outcome of massive work behind the scenes. The actors called to perform the "comedy" are not just the last links of the creative chain, they are the depositaries of the team's ideas, they are their projections, and they are the same conveyance of Those Seven Deadly Things.

– Iggy Passenger, art consultant

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