The Venus of Enzo IORIO, an artistic journey between prehistory and pop art.

Can a 30,000-year-old Venus be put together with the Wi-Fi icon? Of course, if it is someone who is called “The artist of the Venus figurines” doing it. We are talking about Enzo Iorio, an Italian artist, blogger and writer who transformed Venus, the mother goddess, into one of the strengths of his art.

Enzo Iorio began his artistic research in the 1970s using photography and painting.  Reference photographers and artists: Man Ray, Cartier-Bresson, Franco Fontana, Wharol, Hopper, Matisse, Kandinsky.  He went through the production of rayograms, the chemical alterations of photographic processes, photomontages, still life, abstractionism, pop art.

Traces of each of these paths remain in his recent works on Paleolithic Venuses, today made mainly in digital graphics. 

But how did the idea of ​​developing this artistic theme come about?  And what are these Venus figurines?

Enzo Iorio lives in Ventimiglia, an Italian city on the border with France where, in some caves that were inhabited in prehistoric times, archaeologists have found small female figures made of steatite.  These figurines, about 6 centimeters high, are known by the name of “Venus of the Balzi Rossi”.  They have very pronounced physical features, especially the belly, chest and buttocks and for this reason archaeologists believe that they are objects linked to the cult of fertility, widespread in Europe, Africa and Asia.  In fact, there are several places where these venus were found, transported, perhaps, by the ancient mammoth hunters chasing their prey.

In Enzo Iorio’s imagination these Venuses become pop.  They are drawn with bright colors, inserted in fantastic contexts, or in realistic geographical sites, or accompanied by the symbols of our modernity.