The idea to study the concepts of Joy and of Play in contemporary visual art through the work of artists Lorraine Burrell, Peter Liversidge and Antonio Riello has been the starting point for this show. Actually, our research has started from one question. What is the nature of the relation between Joy and Play?

In English language, to play is an ambiguous word. Although some of the possible meanings are for using toys, acting on the stage, playing games and, more generally, not taking things too seriously - it also connects to a sense of "following rules". In a sense, any game has rules, and sometimes strict ones. It is the presence of rules that actually defines a game, makes it different from other games, identifies a fair player and - above all - highlights the contrast between the field of Play and the field of Reality. Rules are what mark the territory of play and contemporarily make it real. Chance, destiny and even criminality are not allowed in the realm of Play. There is Reality for not following fixed rules. In fact, Playdom follows rules, while Realdom does not. In the Reality there may be laws, statistical occurrences of facts, and predictable or habitual behaviours - but not proper "rules".

Artists, aware of this, use their freedom to set themselves fictitious rules (even if we should remember that all rules are fictitious), and eventually to change them at will - which is the most disloyal thing one can do in any game. While creating a set of rules, you define a new game, sometimes so successfully that this new game could become an outstanding, alternative reality. The tension between rule and its transgression creates a positive, meaningful energy. It is this, which confers power to the meaning of the artwork. But Playdom is not always an easy ground to stand on. Fears and nightmares can easily spread, less controlled than they are in the field of reality, because of this risk of the rules being capriciously changed while one is already in the game. The tension between Realdom and Playdom comes by the perceived weakness of the latter. Reality rules, in the end, but the freedom we experience while playing makes play necessary to us.

Of course it is easy to link the idea of Play to feelings of pleasure and joy; while you cannot say that Joy has a symmetric relationship with Play, Joy is a much more mysterious thing.

In an amazingly beautiful piece, condensed from intellectual contempt and inspired by high moral dignity, Latin philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Nero's unsuccessful mentor) exhorts his pupil Lucilius to go beyond the banality of joy: "I wish true joy would never desert you; more, I wish joy to spring into your house. And this will happen, if it is going to happen inside you. Other forms of contentment don't fill the heart: they all are exterior and vane - if you don't believe one to be truly happy only because he is laughing. It is your spirit who has to be happy and rise trustfully above every event. Believe me, true joy is austere." (L.A. Seneca, Letters to Lucilium, no 23) (*)

In her work, Lorraine Burrell constructs portraits of individuals engaged in an activity that is strange or unbecoming. In Happy the adult subject directly faces the video camera, and is seen blowing bubbles with chewing gum - an activity they should have long outgrown. The act of chewing gum, before it was adopted by everyone, was seen as rebellious, however the blowing of bubbles was always a childishly playful act. In these adults, this simple action reveals something of their own character. The work also speaks of communication or lack of it, the bubbles like empty speech bubbles full of hot air, vacuous, with nothing to say. In Burrell's photographic series she mimics family portraiture; the family group are shown not as a unit but as individual subjects shot in an informal way in the domestic environment, their individuality denied, their faces obscured in a bizarre fashion, the family resemblance concealed.

Peter Liversidge continues to extract joy and playfulness from the most macabre of subjects, stuffed buzzards caught in flight as if to swoop on their prey; but below, the landscape is made up of only barren rocks and the carcass of long dead animals. The bleakness of the scenario is contradicted by means of construction. Liversidge creates these landscapes by using techniques drawn from a labour akin to the innocent exploration enjoyed through play. Peter's paintings depict the North Montana Plains - an American wilderness which Liversidge has never visited, and whose topography and events he invents. The work leaves space for our own imagination to fill. It is both comically absurd and quietly poetic, yet it comments on our own reality/mortality.

Antonio Riello deals with the issues of play and joy in his own peculiar way. Usually his concerns shift between criticism and mockery of "big" concepts of popular culture: sex, religion, family and the like. He realizes his ideas in the most appropriate format in this exhibition. Waistcoats are hand-painted with scenes reminiscent of fairytales, but in actual fact they present everyday tragedies as viewed through the voyeurism of popular culture. These scenes, worn on the body of a passer-by wearing the waistcoat, become as medieval crest of arms - somehow mysterious but nevertheless charged of meaning, not to mention moodiness.

We are interested in defining, through the exhibition, the peculiar form of joy that pervades our artists' work. The easy and cheerful smile which invites you to approach the works by the three artists, is actually a device to catch your attention while driving you beyond the material surface, under the skin of the artwork. It is an invitation, an easy path to more serious if not austere issues. Under the joyful mask the artwork retains that complexity which allows it to talk to the visitors.

"Engaged in Recreation" is a vocabulary definition for "Play".

You have never been so serious as when you were playing as a child, and maybe never so happy.

Hugh Mulholland
Vittorio Urbani

(*) "Immo contra volo tibi umquam desse laetitiam. Volo illam tibi domi nasci: nascitur, si modo intra te ipsum fit. Ceterae hilaritates non implent pectus, frontem remittunt, leves sunt, nisi forte tu iudicas eum gaudere, qui ridet: animus esse debet alacer et fidens et supra omnia erectus. Mihi crede, verum gaudium res severa est. " (L.A. Seneca, Litterae ad Lucilium, XXIII)