Thanks to the use of different techniques like installations, photographs, videos and actions Stefano Cagol faces socio-political themes trough the idea of collective identity, underlining in this way the continue change in value system, and the altered balance of actual society.

Analyzing contemporary society transformations, the artwork by Cagol highlights the complexity and contradictions of actual time and expresses the idea of flow, of indefiniteness, of continuous redefinition. So ambiguity, duality, the dark side of our beliefs are the common denominator in his work. The artist looks at the strong symbols of our culture that in his works like in the present time reach different connotations, that express different values, that are synonymous of different points of power, now than in the past, today then yesterday. His research doesn’t want to give a unique answer, but remains open to the interpretations of the observer, suspended in-between negative and positive, in-between familiar and wider meanings, in-between opposed feelings of belonging.

“Even within a polyhedrical and multiform way such as Stefano Cagol’s, various guidelines can be found. They can be detected into the idea of flow, of indefiniteness, and into his continuous redefinition of the concept of reality and fiction. Thanks to the use of different techniques and materials – performances, installations, photographs and especially videos have become part of his “toolbox” - we can in fact find a common denominator in his work that resides in the capacity of facing socio-political themes without giving the impression of a rigid ideological a priori. The opposite, he mainly leaves his work wide open to the single and singular interpretation of the spectator, thus giving the viewer the possibility of reading it through his own inner experiences. Stars and Stripes (2000-2002, and the latest version Lies shown at Platform, London, 2005), a video in which the fluttering of an American flag creates a long series of ambiguous forms, is absolutely emblematic. This artwork – as in many other examples – doesn’t have a beginning or an end, but generates a flow of images and relationships by which it is difficult to distinguish between facts and fiction, between what the artist wants to say and what we can interpret. It is therefore not a coincidence that Tokyo, and more in general the Japanese society, fascinate the artist, precisely because this city can symbolize a crossroad between the imaginary and the real, where one senses that it is the latter to try to pursue as much as possible the virtual expressions that new technologies and the consequent media applications bring (reference is made to the work in progress Tokyospace, 2004, in Japan, and to its continuation in 2006 at the Italian Culture Institute, Tokyo: www.tokyospace.com).

Also by his latest work, Bird Flu (2006), he faces a physical, and above all mental trip in search of a different perception of space, but this time the course is drawn through a Europe that has perhaps taken the risk of Avian flu too seriously; a Europe certain about the possibility of the contaminating effect of a virus that has never been transmitted from man to man. Fear, the fact is renown, is not always nurtured by true data. The opposite, the more one distances himself from the daily dimension (out of which the categories of mystery, of the unknown, of the different, and of the stranger make their way), the more fear is quickly spread and we are seized precisely where our defenses are the weakest.

Ambiguity, duality, the dark side of our lives appear to us in Stefano Cagol’s artworks in all their simplicity: without the rhetoric that often accompanies them, without the narrative emphasis that often supplies them with a sensation of redundancy and of falsity, often even without a wink, and therefore without being conveyed through the seduction of images, but by trying to reduce the work of art down to a dry essentiality.” (Roberto Pinto, independent curator, former curator of Gwangju and Tirana Biennales)