Here is a presentation made by Peggy Sue Amison (curator):
Marco Vernaschi’s Placebo is an intense journey of direct experience, a therapeutic and illusory investigation on the role of sexual energy meant as the core of human existence. Vernaschi expresses the upheaval, solitude and silence of life capturing physical moments through a destabilizing, dreamlike series of visual poems. His photographs are an honest and unconscious examination of his humanity, a research through his own existence in which the process of experience becomes the answer.
Placebo constantly assaults the viewer in its overwhelming power and affirmation of pure physicality. The images are cast in an aura of violence revealed as a basic component of human nature, of nature itself, the essence of civilization’s foundation. A violence that holds within it a mixture of fear and pleasure, mirroring Vernaschi’s own sense of existentialism.
The creative process is a cocktail of immediacy, instinct, frenzy and observation. The images which make up Placebo, range from moments of calm contemplation, delving deeply into the ferocity of fucking, traveling to a moment of uncontrollable orgasm when time and consciousness evaporate and experience becomes exclusively sensate.
Vernaschi looks unflinchingly at a collection of visceral, humanistic moments exploring deeper psychological states. He recreates through his life a series of dreams and hallucinations, to understand the equilibrium between pleasure and desire. Marco wanders the borders between sane and insane, turning reality into a surreal world of lust and abandon where the loss of senses is the path to wisdom, in which sex is the animal voice of truth.
Placebo was exhibited in 2011 at 54th Venice Biennale, and will be published as a book in 2012.
