Neo-terreste, 1979 is a series of nine works: very emblematic works; hard, rough and essential works, where the rituality of the being coagulates in hieratic, priestly poses in a strict aesthetic, diametrically opposite to traditional and psychological pornography of the television programmes; where the face of the father of the artist and the face of a woman (the mother of the artist) question themselves on big paradoxes of the existence; the eternity and the becoming, the space and the time, the limit and the infinite, the physicality and the metaphysics.

Starting at the beginning of the 70s, Michele Zaza (Molfetta, Puglia, 1948) questioned himself on the big problems of art; art as research, experimentation; art especially as testimony and thought. In addition to antiquated and academic means of painting and sculpture, from the beginning he understood that photography was the perfect mean for his new research. In this manner he became one of the main interpreters of the conceptual photography. From the 70s until today, the huge power of television and in the last few years the huge diffusion of internet has offered and still offers millions and millions of images, photographs, videos, multiplied in an inexhaustible series of banality and foolishness. In front of this enormous approval to depreciation; in front of this extended power that would bring us back to being animals – the eating and the reproducing, the food and the sex are the two primary instinct on which the most popular programmes are based on – Michele Zaza has always created images, works in photographic series or videos, full of thought, of interrogations on meaning and no-meaning.

In the middle the human, its figure, its presence, its face. A face or other faces, mostly its relatives, never idealised, never fake, never sweetened. Around real and unreal shapes: cotton clouds, artificial flowers, lights, pillows, clocks, stars, to indicate the possible presence of different universes, different shapes, together with an animal and an angel; a heavy and limited body, always subject to a sad and dramatic metamorphosis of ageing and extinction; and a free, open and unlimited mind, capable of ample and abstract thoughts and desires.