Fake Safe (2018)
Fake Safe challenges the “ready made”: it is its nemesis. It’s not an everyday object which the artist turns into art. Is art that turns into everyday object.
This is the will of my «paintings installation»: paintings which are free from virtuosity or hyperrealism but get camouflaged in the ambient, loosing their “art halo”. And when the eyes of the public penetrate their illusion, the painting reveal its secret and get its art halo back again.
I have installed this painting in Genoa’s underground, where it stayed for two weeks. The red box has been vandalized but saving the most precious painted part. Is still to be detected if this happened because the public recognized the aesthetics value of the artwork, or because usually the real yellow plastic glass is bad for writing. Nor we know if writers has been aware to be the public of this painting.
Previous samples from this project are present in Pesaro INAIL collection, curated by Ludovico Pratesi.
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Arcadia (2018)
Since the beginning of my profession I desired to paint a series inspired by classicism starting from pornography frames. But I knew without the right approach I would have fall into kitsch. Black and white became the solution to avoid style missteps.
The pornographic material, with its excess aesthetics, functional to male masturbation, become transmuted by black and white and by classicist portrait format. The extreme blur steals the reference picture from its original purpose, freeing the woman figure from willing prostitution to a less useful goal.
Emerging sincerity breaking the exaggerated acting of porn intrigues me. While the male looks spontaneous and monotonous, the female hide herself behind the provocative expression. But for a position change, an accidental movement or a peak of real pleasure, the actress disappear and show the woman.
In ancient Greece, Arcadia was the idealistic place untouched by struggle or consumption. The series closes up with a variation: Arcadia #12 title shows the motto “et in Arcadia ego” which can be translated as “I too [was] in Arcadia”. The phrase appears for the first time in art and architecture in 1612 painting The Arcadian Shepherds by Guercino, and has been repeated several times since then, meaning the presence of death even in pure, rural, idyllic life.
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Dionysus (2017)
From my art notes: “I can’t renounce to paint. And I won’t give up to achieve the masters’ quality. It’s not about correct anatomy, or color balance, nor I care about prospective or the natural beauty itself. What I can’t stop caring about is the fearless strokes and colorfield from XV century italian painters and their striking pure colors and brave contrast.
I can paint whatever I want. All I need is an excuse. But the excuse need to be good. And I feel I found a good one”. This is what I wrote when I discover this Bacco (Dionysus) from Bartolomeo Guidobono at Palazzo Reale in Genova. It would have been perfect to develop a series to unify my work about antique and contemporary techniques.
The interference of the painting surface with overlay of raw color create an illusory space within the painting matter. The destruction of the image convey what the construction can’t bring no more: sense of loss, mystery and naturalness.
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Judith (2016)
[…] A similar absurdity has been written also about Baselitz: being upside down, they said his figures lose their objective nature become “pure paint”. But is true the contrary: there is a new emphasis added to the objectivity that assume a new substance. “Pure paint” is an empty concept, and a line is interesting just if produce interesting association” – Gerhard Richter
This is a series of 12 oil on canvas, after an oil by August Riedel (Germany, 1799-1883) in which the biblical figure Judith stands holding a sword, the decapitated head of Holofernes partially visible behind her on the left.
A summary of the biblical story reads, “Judith, a beautiful widow, is able to enter the tent of Holofernes because of his desire for her. Holofernes was an Assyrian general who was about to destroy Judith’s home, the city of Bethulia. Overcome with drink, he passes out and is decapitated by Judith…”.
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Omnivorous Migrant (2015)
Omnivorous Migrant series has been painted in Kristiansand (Norway) in 3 months art residency. From my project proposal:
“In XVI and XVII centuries many European artists undertook the Grand Tour. Italian Renaissance and Baroque artists were the heart of visual revolution and great masters or young talent wanted to study them for grow their proficiency. Nowadays Italian’s decadency, force contemporary artists to reverse the concept of Grand Tour, finding elsewhere social structures able to embrace creative production with cultural and economic fertile ground and constructive feedbacks, changing the host in a migrant and viceversa.
Since the beginning, artists’ workplace is the world itself. Intuitions and process begin in everyday life and the collection of references starts before enter in the studio. The Grand Tour was a magnification of this flow: travellers’ diaries describe more the journey than the destinations. The active contemplative dimension of the travel by chariot or boat was an experience itself, due the risk and the several weeks to be completed.
This procedure is nowadays almost extinguished by flight connections, which substituted contemplation, risks and encounters, with self-referential entertainment, confining the mind to autocracy and virtuality. As a new migrant, I’m gonna refresh the Grand Tour, and to enhance its procedure I will slow down my travel going by train across Europe to Norway, recording references of the travel, especially landscapes photographies by wagon’s window and train’s ambience noises.
In Kristiansand, in the following 2 months I will work to produce a 12 paintings’ installation to propose in a final exhibition the audio/visual/olfactive experience of my Grand Tour as a senses’ diary. This will accent the creative process of the artist as an activity outside of the workplace, belonging to the entire world, but his practical work linked to a specific and prolific space
Final purpose of the installation isn’t to reproduce the experience of the travel, but, as a diary, share the experience and reveal in the viewer the need to travel and contemplate the world with slower motion. The illusory reality of blurred paintings enhance the virtuality of the described experience, and the extraneousness of the viewer to the tale itself, because even if shared by any communication, a travel, as the entire life, is an intimate private conversation between ourself and the world’s demeanour”.
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Alessandria (2015)
The «Alessandria» series has been the presentation for my Migrant Omnivorous project. Alessandria (Piemonte, Italy) has a Nordic atmosphere, and the highest cases of suicide in Italy. The series is based on photographs I made by Genoa – Milan regional train’s windows in 2008.
Oil on canvas, the blurred effect is obtained with baroque technique of «soffusione» with a large brush for wall paint, to destroy the previously detailed paint work. This technique became part of my entire artwork.
Not the full series has been push so far, some others stay as “abbozzo”, some others has been blurred to the extreme consequence, losing almost completely any figurative information to gain something close to a monochrome.
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