The lyricism of Zicarelli's exhibit is reminiscent of most black metal songs. Since his two-part exhibit Into The Abyss in 2011, he has been mining the visual idioms of this metal subgenre to elucidate his ideas on the "dark side of pop culture" , furthering the use of archetypal symbols of black metal which is as extremely dogmatic and total in its principles, beliefs and visual codes that leaves no room for gray areas nor ambiguities in demarcating polarities of what should and shouldn't be, painting the world around them in the utmost absolute of all or nothing of black.

All smoke and mirrors then, and the need to concoct similes, objectifying these concepts of perception in non-perception in affixing them with tangible nouns - "as dark as the snake, as dark as the throne", as though feeling through this darkness with empty outstretched hands.

Zicarelli opts to illuminate these things from glints from mirror shards, from spots unshaded by his graphite pen that shades in shapes to images of skulls, dark forests, dreary unruly locks hanging in tangles, disco balls, smashed guitars, dead rock stars, tattoo emblems; from the blinding white neon cutting through all these metaphor-laden semaphores.

But we are only made to see, what is to be seen, in the high drama theatrics that Zicarelli sets us up in, in the safe confines of the gallery experience. If we could still be nudged out of apathy, nudged out of the sleek cool aesthetics of the cliched romanticism of it all, or rather that nothing else matters now.

-words by Lena Cobangbang

Image: © Costantino Zicarelli, Silverlens Galleries