Apocalisse dell’ora

Albumarte presents the work of Alessandro Giannì whose apocalyptic visions shape from the encounter between man and machine and the osmotic relationship that develops between them. «Anthropomorphic and deformed figures with hidden faces and lower limbs extending like spectral shadows follow one another as if they were a chorus of demons within a frame reminiscent of both pre-renaissance architectural motifs and today’s computer screen savers». This is how curator Lorenzo Gigotti introduces the exhibition L’Apocalisse dell’ora, immediately establishing the atmosphere that visitors experience when confronted by the images on big television screens installed in the space.

Alessandro Giannì, a new generation artist, has favoured painting as his primary research tool, debunking the myth that an artist necessarily need to use technology to be innovative. The world has been swallowed up in the vortex of everything produced by technology – images, information and the dynamic of sharing. This has deleted any possible border between analogue and digital.

«Ñewpressionism», an artistic movement launched by Miltos Manetas and presented for the first time to the public at the Swiss Institute in Milan in 2013, put this vision into practice, an idea in gestation for a long time, the vision of cyberspace coming to land in an analogue reality where everything is examined and filtered by technology. A very young Alessandro Giannì was part of this new current, a new landscape and a fresh way of depicting it which could be found in between impenetrable layers, compressed by the thick texture made from fully analogue dried web pages. In this network of analogue works we can already glimpse the multiple disturbing figures emerging from Giannì’s imagination and settling on the canvass.

In these more recent pieces, even if present in deformed shapes, man is not part of this vision of the future; ‘the doubt that insinuates itself is that this is an element re-elaborated with the use of machine models according to their capacity to calculate – models that, in turn, bring about a crisis not only for our biological reality as human beings, but for our very conception of time’.

It is necessary to reflect, therefore, on the so-called end of the anthropogenic world. Painting immerses us in this future vision even more than the works of virtual reality with which Giannì engages for the first time, attempting to ‘represent this vision in space using an immersive reality’.

Alessandro Gianni,  L’Apocalisse dell’ora, curated by Lorenzo Gigotti,

Albumarte, Roma, until July 19, 2019

images: (cover 1) Alessandro Giannì, «L’apocalisse dell’ora», 2014, cm200x300, oil on canvas (2) Alessandro Giannì, «L’apocalisse dell’ora», exhibition view, AlbumArte, 2019 Ph. Sebastiano Luciano, courtesy AlbumArte (3) Alessandro-Giannì, «Senza-titolo», 2018 (4-5) Alessandro Giannì, «Questa razza di diavoli non conosce regole!», video projection and Htc Vive. 2019. 3d Modeling: Andrea Papi; programming and VR graphic: Weirdo Vanilla (Daniele Monaca and Cosimo Mollica) Ph. Sebastiano Luciano, courtesy AlbumArte (6) Alessandro Giannì, «Indistinte e nebbiose sono le immagini, nebbiose e indistinte sono le cose», 2019, ceramic, cm 33x50x27 Ph. Sebastiano Luciano, courtesy AlbumArte