Il duo Italiano xxxxxxxxxxxItalian 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.  Featured here is their first project together, “The Essence of Decadence.”  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.  It is a distinct pleasure to introduce these talented young artists, whose work has been featured in several international exhibitions but only once before in this country, to an American audience.  The exhibition is organized by the Bellarmine Museum of Art and presented in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Quick Center for the Performing Arts of Fairfield University.