The first one to notice that the time was ripe was Elena Salmistraro, accustomed to moving on the blurry borderline between art and design, and therefore more attuned to the para-figurative meaning of form than to the dictates of rigid old-functionalist values.
In this regard, the visual simplification found in digital interfaces and in the look (and morals) of comicbook superheroes – the unrivaled protagonists of cinema in recent years – represents the mirror of sentiment of an entire epoch, in which the individual, overwhelmed by complexity of information that becomes impenetrable due to an excess of transparency, seeks refuge in facile, two-dimensional, ‘graphic’ interpretations of reality.
The worrying spread of conspiracy theories, driven by the production of fake news, also comes from the same need to understand a density of information that goes beyond the possibility of decoding on the part of the individual, who to avoid being swamped chooses the path of extreme simplification, to the point of distorting reality to make it comply with the reassuring ease of comprehension of the narration of plots. Actually, it is precisely the sensation that something unresolved is lurking beneath the glow of glossy graphics that invalidates, like a virus, our faith in the contemporary aesthetic scenario, calling forth by way of opposition the primal energies of pre-modern cultures.