The Essence of Decadence

Italian artists Tania Brassesco (b. 1986) and Lazlo Passi Norberto (b. 1984) met as students in Venice in 2008. They have collaborated on several series of photographs that fuse their experience in performance, painting, set design, installation, photography and video. "The Essence of Decadence" is their first project together. The seven photographs, in which Tania appears as the model and artistic muse, reprise with uncanny fidelity the moody, poetic compositions of Gustav Klimt and other fin-de-siècle painters. Using the elastic, expressive and contemporary medium of photography, the artists painstakingly translate and reproduce with an almost surreal, magical verisimilitude the language of painting from another epoch. The result is a series of images that are hyper-real artistic fiction. This intriguing paradox is the essence of Tania and Lazlo's work.

This exhibition is organized by the Bellarmine Museum of Art and presented in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Quick Center for the Arts of Fairfield University.