Author: whatever

Tropical cataclysm

“Tropical Cataclysm, Soft Apocalypse, and The Final Happy End” are three series of works that reflect on visions we create for the future, how we imagine what lies ahead, and what scenarios await us. Projecting into a future scenario is clearly a fascinating mental game, with endless possibilities for modeling and the consequent creation of numerous scenarios without any certainty of their truth. But what we can see for certain is that we live in a period where it is increasingly difficult to project ourselves into the myth of a prosperous future. Instead, we can only envision scenarios of an uncertain and often tragic future.

“Tropical Cataclysm” takes us to a scenario overwhelmed by environmental storm. A landscape enveloped in sand, heat, immersed in a scorching silence. The natural environment transformed, the cataclysm created by human beings. The unexpected consequences after years of endless well-being and consumption. The myth of paradise on earth disintegrates in collective unconsciousness. The control we thought we had achieved over nature and our future proves to be an illusion, a myth that has always been.

The Perception of the Desert

We perceive a constant, subterranean vibration that shakes the society in which we live. These are days when a widespread and pervasive crisis seems to envelop everything. The uncertainties of the world. Economic, social, political, and cultural. The idea of a great global crisis that seems to surround everything. This is accentuated by the economic system of consumption, a mechanism that has unleashed an unprecedented and dramatic environmental change.

We live in days of lost orientation and collective meaning. Everything is covered by an unknown fog of sand and dust, preventing us from seeing and acting. We wander in this haze of heat and dust, encountering objects from our consumer society. Fetish objects, simultaneously obsolete, built to dissolve over time, disintegrating before our eyes. Yet, these objects give meaning to our wandering in this fog, in a horizon without points of orientation, in a return to dust.

Soft apocalypse

The announced cataclysm, the long-awaited catastrophe. Images of a dystopian and paradoxical future, science-fiction visions. A world left to abandonment, shrouded in silence. The quiet night arrives.

But if ruin seems inevitable to us, the collective myth intertwined with hope can lead us to envision a disaster accompanied by surreal stillness. A devastated environment reverting to a predominant nature, yet one where we can still live as comfortable spectators. A catastrophe that remains aesthetically positive and pleasing to our senses. Probably an imaginative image distant from the reality that awaits us, as we can no longer believe in a global catastrophe; the wealth and domination over the world we have acquired forbid it.

TELEPORT

The desert

“The Desert” is an installation of a large-format painting on which a video is projected.

The two mediums, painting and video, interact with each other and the two superimposed images create the vibrant optical illusion of a dazzling metropolis. This is the place of the “pursuit of happiness” of the individual, the place where we can realize our desires and our ambitions.

The bright lights of the metropolis shine and make the intricate set of buildings pulsate, the vital whirlwind of the city that never sleeps. The viewer observes the unreal panorama, the mirage, and the illusion is inevitable.

But an apocalyptic sky thickens over the metropolis, foreshadowing an uncertain future. It is an omen that begins to sow doubt about the myth of the abundance and fertility of the future.

Hotel Chihuahua

The obsession with paradisiacal places continues with the Chihuahua Holiday series. A parody of unreal images, where our tropical islands, places of worship for billions of tourists, are transformed into places of interplanetary communication: a new horizon into which to pour our utopias.

Chihuahua Holiday is series composed of several paintings and video slides that represent the collective dream of tourism and, at the same time, show the hidden face of this phenomenon: the inevitable implosion of this dream. With environmental and climatic changes and with the pressure of the touristic wave, the dream can only collapse upon itself and leave the place to be destroyed by this contemporary vision.

The last mountain

A series of paintings in which we find the idealised and stereotypical mountain landscape. These reflect the postcard image we have of this mythical landscape. Where every snow-covered peak and valley is represented in an ideal balance: the perfect panorama seen from the terrace of the chalet where we spend the weekend in relaxation.

Yet another illusion of our time. It is an image whose future we know is destined for memory. The signs are now inescapable and we all know them, and these places that seemed seemingly inviolable to us are being rapidly transformed by the consequences of our global society.

An imagery destined for extinction and condemned to the past. Images that seem to be frozen in the past, wrecks that are about to return to their archaic form of stone, of which only a plastic and artificial memory will remain.

Comfort zone

The idealization of nature returns in this series of landscapes with a stereotypical aesthetic that perfectly meets the criteria of the digital world: one where dreams are standardized and beauty is the dominant element. These images that come to us from the internet form our current idea of nature. These days, the knowledge of what is natural is created through the observation of a monitor: you can enjoy the perfect landscape calmly sitting on your couch.

The paintings of the islands were created from collages of images of beaches and cliffs found on the internet, symbols of ideal vacation destinations. The mountain landscapes follow the same aesthetic, but their elaboration starts from photographs, which are then digitally elaborated and finally transformed into a painting. Throughout this process, all details are developed: the colors are brought back to their ideal balance and the landscape is modelled. The result is an aesthetic that is both monotonous and relaxing, where artificially constructed forms and contrasts are perceived as natural and absolutely “perfect”.

Relax beach & Farwest

These two installations are a combination of painting, video projection and sound. The projection overlaps the paintings in order to provide a vibrant optical illusion that evokes the contemporary vision of the much-desired paradise island. The spectator, comfortably seated on a beach chair, sits in front of this seductive and warm vision accompanied by soft Caribbean music. It is a dance between illusion and reality.

Farwest, a large-format triptych, depicts a silhouette of a woman in a room observing the tropical landscape on the horizon. At first glance, this technique appears to be very realistic, but the more you interact with the image, the more your attention shifts away from the silhouette of a woman in the foreground to the landscape on the horizon. By plunging into the landscape in the background, we realize that its texture is fragmented like a pixelated mosaic. By superimposing a moving video on a painted landscape, optical games form a sort of visual illusion that pushes both the woman and the viewer towards a virtual and digital horizon.

This shows the call of an unknown and unexplored land, exotic and tropical. It is the vision of a new digital world, an unlimited horizon, and an image that carries within it the utopia and the vision of the future.

The only immutable element of the image seems to be the young woman’s pregnancy. It is an ancestral call, unviolated by the illusions of time, which leads us to reflect on the present and future reality.

comfort zone

The idealization of nature returns in this series of landscapes with a stereotypical aesthetic that perfectly meets the criteria of the digital world: one where dreams are standardized and beauty is the dominant element. These images that come to us from the internet form our current idea of nature. These days, the knowledge of what is natural is created through the observation of a monitor: you can enjoy the perfect landscape calmly sitting on your couch. The paintings of the islands were created from collages of images of beaches and cliffs found on the internet, symbols of ideal vacation destinations.

Global Vision

The global map has become, through the development of digital technology and digital mapping, a familiar and popular icon. In this work, I use this perception to make the world map a spectacular and fluid representation of a world in constant motion, where land masses become “a source of light”. The planetary map here seems to float in continuous motion. Even if it was conceived as a scientific construction for the control of the environment, it becomes here a playful and illusory work.

Thanks to a particular technique of painting on semi-transparent plates combined with a special light installation, I create light effects and dynamic reflections, which give this world map a fluid and continuous aspect, creating a radiant and illusory vision.

Meccanismo d’informazioni

This installation reflects how the information we receive daily from the mass media contributes to the creation of a fragmented vision of the world. It seeks to address the way in which the media disseminate multiple statistical information about the countries of the world.

The combination of portraits and statistical data projected in rhythm over the highlighted countries leads the spectator to “read” the people represented on the basis of their physical features but especially through information concerning geography, economy or demography.

Acrylic on Canvas (100 x 100 cm) –
with flag and statistics projection

Today, these figures undoubtedly constitute our representation of the different countries and their inhabitants. However, they are purely scientific information that reduces each situation, event, person or place to numbers. The scientific data, apparently so precise and immutable, is the result of an analytical process often influenced by economic and political reasons as well as by the geopolitical situation of a given time period. The contemporary individual and his or her identity are now part of a scientific information mechanism. They is just one piece of data in a global analysis, a number in a calculation whose value is interpreted according to his or her position in this equation.

Acrylic on Canvas (100 x 100 cm) –
with flag and statistics projection

Acrylic on Canvas (100 x 100 cm) –
with flag and statistics projection

Virtual Horizons

“Virtual horizons” are digital collages of landscapes of specific countries, each geo-located, thanks to an associated map which helps to give a position in reality to these apparently surreal places.

The material used for the collage comes from different images of landscapes that the search engines show us as representative of a given territory. These images are the product of a trend that increasingly follows “the popular and global visual taste”. The result is that the territories and places are represented by “cover images”. An aesthetic through which it emerges a new perception of various countries and their territories: they are all incredibly similar to each other and they create a homogeneous unreal vision.

UTOPIA

Utopia is a multimedia installation that immerses the viewer in a continuous flow of news stories from international newspapers, allowing them to pay attention to the dynamics and contradictions of mass media storytelling.

Excerpts from news stories that have been chosen according to their geopolitical aspects and their media resonance and are edited to create a narrative plot. These short collages of stories, because of their impact and their appearance in a compressed time frame, are able to produce a melodramatic whole. The spectator observes this daily drama installed comfortably in a room furnished with beach chairs. The result is a visual, cacophonous show. Even if the facts are real, the installation creates the conditions for an uncritical, almost superficial and enthusiastic voyeurism.

The spectator is overwhelmed by the steady stream of images and sounds; but the installation also offers a small alternative refuge: in-between the cascades of images and informations there is a bright tropical island. A headset plays a Caribbean jingle that allows the visitor to free himself or themself from the external context by choosing the luminous island. This set-up creates a private and secure space in opposition to the “cascade of realities”. This utopia, even if it gives the viewer a feeling of powerlessness and passivity, comes to their aid and lets them take a step away and separates them from the frenzy of the world.

Digital Transmutation

This series of hyper-realistic paintings is the mirror of a daily ritual: individuals isolate themselves and immerse themselves in the boundless virtual world. From the first waking hours of our days, to the last ones, we live in a digital reality within which we work, interact, discuss, communicate or simply surf the internet. We live in an existential paradox of physical isolation and overwhelming online connection.

This is a new reality without borders, formed by information, numbers, emotions and ways of life. It is a world that, thanks to all our data, expands at any moment and continues to evolve even when we are not physically present.

It is a parallel existence that allows the individual to become the entity of their own creation, in a place where social and moral structures are not yet as defined as they seem to be in the real world. Each can create new roles, occupy their own space and experience scenarios or transformations which would be unrealizable in physical reality.