Future Perfect V Sculpture

“This is a utopian space where the distinction between animate and inanimate is perverted. Objects abandon their passiveness reproducing in an utterly ineffable way and by doing so liberate themselves from thousands of years of unwanted dependence”. Future Perfect text curated by Luke Jennings Prompting comparison with Calder and Brancusi, but raunchier than either, Diego Fortunato is the unchallenged master of the eroto-protoplasmatic. Breathtaking in their primal simplicity, his objects define a brave new world of futuristic "perfection play". ‘Hot or not?’ isn’t a question much asked in the field of contemporary art appraisal. And yet it is one forced on us by Diego Fortunato, whose protoplasmic and agendered forms are at once glacial in their detachment, and sizzlingly insistent in their tension. We are conscious, always, of imminent insertion, of enclosure, of ‘docking procedures’. Globular and lubricious – immobile mobiles, if you will - his protoplasmic forms constantly threaten, but never actually effect, sexual anschluss (1). The suggestive has been a force in art since long before Michaelangelo chiselled the dimples on David’s buttocks. But the potency of Fortunato’s forms resides less in their quasi-physicality than in their ludic directional flow. They are unpersönlich (2). They do not come on strong. But we see, in their latency, the possibility of a serene new post-pornographic innocence. A state Gwynneth Paltrow, echoing Lacan, has defined as “the next level of conscience”. (1) connection (2) aloof