Contemporary Projects
For the most part, the work of Dennis Del Favero begins with stories, usually newscasts. With these stories there is no beginning or end, they are simply misbegotten situations into which everyday people have been flung in parts of the world much less safe than ours. The installations do not repeat, relate or complete a story, instead they can best be said to deepen the emotional awareness that exists outside the narration of mere facts. An emotional energy of hopelessness surrounds Del Favero's work, which exudes the despair normally swallowed up in the jingoistic pseudo-objectivity of the media.
The allure of the title, Sottovoce, installed on Level two at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, was purposely misleading. It was not to be mistaken for the cooing of the mother's voice but rather the silent voices that, for the artist, seem to want to burst through the elaborate sameness of broadcast tragedy. If our age is the age after the one of fixed ideology and distasteful utopian coercions, Del Favero considers that history is a diffuse and eroding surface that is constantly reforming, growing and dying, a universe of subjective fragments whose only resistance from absorption into the abyss is that these experiences are often shared by a small community. If terrorism is a relatively new phenomenon, the new groups which have resulted from it, both offensively and defensively, hearken to the very basis of civilisation: human conclaves grouped for the purpose of self-preservation. In Sottovoce, this primal awareness is in the stylised projection of a young attractive couple, naked, steeped in an eroticism marred by prior violation or impending danger. Powerless, they cower in the light like Holocaust