Riproduzione e riattivazione

In an era of wide media diffusion and accessibility, the possibility of enjoying distant artworks in their physical absence is almost unlimited. However, the aspiration to the uniqueness of the artistic experience in presence has never disappeared, and it manifests itself in the frequent need in contemporary art practices to preserve certain degrees of irreproducibility. The works of the artist ‘Ravo’ are in this regard an exemplary case in which the relationship between reproducibility, the interplay between copy and original, and the uniqueness of an artwork raise the following question: how could the street art re-proposition or “reactivation” of iconographic subjects from the classical painting tradition be an innovative aesthetic experimentation and not just a simple reproduction or copy? This essay retraces some aspects of the traditional dichotomies such as original-copy and reproducibility-irreproducibility, showing how certain artistic strategies, such as those of Andrea Ravo Mattoni, can revive well-known images of our cultural tradition that became almost transparent or invisible to our contemporary gaze.