ALESSANDRO DI GIAMPIETRO

"….Nell ambito della possibilita di rimetterre insieme le storie
…….Configurazioni possibili"

Il lavoro di Alessandro Di Giampietro nasce dall’osservazione dell’identità umana intesa come
insieme di stratificazioni che creano modelli comportamentali iconici nella società di oggi; esplora
i rituali umani, le pratiche intorno al corpo e i giochi che le persone mettono in scena per passare
da un archetipo a un altro. Ogni suo lavoro è un tentativo di ricostruire un evento in cui il confine
oscilla tra realtà e finzione, come quando gli esseri umani sono prigionieri dell’incantesimo del
comportamento sociale abituale. L’artista osserva l’essenza primordiale, avezza a camuffarsi, che
scatena la sua potenza quando chiede ai suoi modelli di giocare con maschere e oggetti di scena
e di rivelare la profondità del loro essere, svelandone i desideri più reconditi e i segreti taciuti.
Questo processo gli permette di collegarsi con l’energia intima che vede nei soggetti a cui scatta
una foto, sia nelle messe in scena che quando lavora con snap-shots spontanei. Il suo lavoro si
concentra principalmente su ritratti perché è affascinato dai negoziati inespressi che ogni essere
umano mette in atto con se stesso/stessa, al fine di esprimere l’assoluto. Questi rituali, per Di
Giampietro, indicano una magia istintiva che sottolinea l’unicità di ogni persona e che definiscono
il senso di individualità in generale. La mia pratica non ha un medium fisso ma spazia dalla
fotografia agli happening, installazione, video e danza intesa come liberazione inconscia del
movimento.

Le opere selezionate per questa esposizione rappresentano l’occasione di rimettere insieme
diversi lavori che Alessandro Di Giampietro (Pescara,1972) ha eseguito negli ultimi quindici anni
tra Milano, Lisbona e Lubiana.
Il percorso parte da un nucleo di cento Polaroid scelte dai diversi progetti sviluppati tra il 2009 e il
2021. Goldenboy, 2009-2010, lavori presentati da Davide Di Maggio e documentati con due libri:
Roadside picnic Stromboli - Fiorucci art Trust - edito da Salerno editrice ; e l’edizione dei 20 anni
dello spazio Viafarini. Polaroid strappate e ricomposte che rappresentato i ritratti di persone del
mondo dell’arte, artisti, curatori. Overlapping, 2010-2011, documenta il censimento dei residenti
maggiorenni dell’ isola di Stromboli, Polaroid collages. Progetto supportato e prodotto da Fiorucci
Art Trust, in mostra per La prima edizione di “Volcano Extravaganza” 2011, curato da Milovan
Farronato. A vam Je Jasno, 2019, progetto\disco per la band post punk Balans, (Jump the
mummy). Trasformazione termodinamica priva di variazioni di energia interna. Protezioni
dagli agenti esterni, 2021. Serie di autoritratti in costume in ambienti non famigliari. Il lavoro
realizzato in un periodo di tempo transitorio, nel rientro in Italia dopo 5 anni passati tra la Slovenia
e il Portogallo, nel quale ero ospite in diversi luoghi. The Nowness of the Everyday portrait,
2022-2023, ritratti di maschera.

La fotografia è un medium espressivo dell’artista, un “fermo immagine” dove si intersecano
diverse discipline artistiche; da uno scatto di scena o di vita reale, di un video o di una
performance, come in costume o in maschera. Il volto, il corpo, i costumi, la maschera sono i
soggetti di una ricerca che indaga le identità possibili. Insieme alle polaroid due sculture dalla
serie Dove i sogni si accomodano. Maschere di scena, pezzi unici realizzati dall’artista e intese
come “opere aperte”.
Tra le opere realizzate appositamente per la mostra, Fosforo della serie Rivelate; cucite
dall’artista in chiffon colorati che attivano la trasparenza del tessuto attraverso la luce e il
movimento degli agenti atmosferici, come a dire che i mascheramenti dell’essere possano
ricondursi anche a quelli della natura.
Legati alla serie delle Rivelate, saranno presenti alcuni Bozzetti, studi preparatori in parte eseguiti
per il progetto The Nowness of the Everyday realizzato per Casa degli Artisti nel 2023. Sono
maschere disegnate con l’uso dello smartphone, stampate a laser su carta, frammentate e
ricucite con graffette in metallo. Impreziosite da un profilo in alluminio dorato, divengono veri e
propri lavori autonomi.
Due Masticate, di cui una commissionata appositamente dalla galleria; sono tra gli ultimi lavori
con il quale l’artista si sta cimentando. Pitture masticate su pvc, figure o meglio maschere
costituite nella loro essenza dalle stesse materie contraddittorie della società e dei costumi attuali.

Il secondo atto della mostra NEITHER YOU NOR I, si concentra sugli ultimi lavori
dell’artista, le Plastiche masticate.La galleria quindi,

dopo aver presentato un excursus quindicennale di opere realizzate
attraverso vari medium: fotografia, scultura, collage, tessuti, video; focalizza questa
nuova esposizione su un’opera di grande formato, cm. 286x200, Pupazza, in p.v.c,
pittura acrilica e graffette metalliche. Il soggetto deriva da una figura rappresentata in una
grande Rivelata, opera in chiffon colorati realizzata per Casa degli Artisti di Milano nel
2022. Questo soggetto origina in realtà da un happening immortalato in una Polaroid
(presente in mostra) del 2019. Di questi mascheramenti sono visibili anche due
Complementi d’arredo, maschere eseguite a Lubiana nel 2015.

Visibile in tre versioni, Pupazza incarna un alter ego (“un’altro io”) dell’artista, una figura
efeba, nel linguaggio corrente di oggi la parola è passata a indicare al contrario della
tradizione greca, un non-adulto, un ragazzo molto giovane, dalla bellezza delicata, quasi
femminea. Il taglio a mezzo busto ricorda quella di una foto tessera, formato utile al
documento che connota e fissa la nostra identità. Anche in questi casi, l’artista indaga
nell’identità umana intesa come insieme di stratificazioni che creano modelli
comportamentali iconici nella società di oggi. Ogni lavoro è un tentativo di ricostruire un
evento in cui il confine oscilla tra realtà e finzione, come quando gli esseri umani sono
prigionieri dell’incantesimo del comportamento sociale abituale. (LORENZO VATALARO)

Alessandro Di Giampietro's project for the Casa degli Artisti in Milan, offers metaphors of the existential dimension, which are visible and at the same time invisible, and that present themselves as a kind of mediation between the self and the world. For this building, made according to the canons of rationalist architecture and whose ancient function was that of a house-workshop of the arts, as well as a meeting place for artists and creative people of the old Milan, the intervention designed by Alessandro Di Giampietro follows a process of dematerialisation of art. It consists of a modular installation that participates in the overall appearance of the building without it losing its identity.

The Nowness of the everyday, designed for a space that has always been an incubator of research and experimentation, consists of a series of curtains sewn by the artist himself, in which needle and thread are used as if they were sculpture tools. Altering, adding, transforming, each element of the module is different from the other, these entities will protect all the windows of the building from the outside, restoring a different spatial dimension of the place while remaining vibrating and aleatory elements. By being exposed to the light of the day and the reflections of the night, to the sun but also to the rain and the wind, to the breeze as well as to the bad weather, this site-specific installation, in addition to generating a deliberate optical irritation linked to the intentions of the psychology of perception, opens up to many forms of exchange and relational aesthetics that cannot be predetermined.

Before assuming its traditional and modern role, the curtain element was originally created to protect interiors from excessive solar radiation and to shelter from excessive light. There are many examples of its representation in the images of the History of Art, starting way back with the mosaics of the Romanesque basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Ravenna, where the mosaic depicts large curtains gathered by embrasse, or the dark green velvet curtain in Lorenzo Lotto's sacred altarpiece (1521) sheltering the Blessed Virgin with Saints, or the custom among 17th century artists of equipping their portrait studios with curtains of various weights to regulate natural light. By using different fabrics and surfaces, on which the colour gives way to light transit, or the transparencies of the materials that constitutes the work, their colour stage, and a whole series of other elements, the installation places itself in dialogue with the gravity of the walls of the architecture.Always at the crossroads of photography and performance, from the outset Alessandro Di Giampietro's practice has been functional and provocative, combining the craftsmanship of manual making, the material and gestural dimension, with radical movements. In doing so, Di Giampietro emphasises the vision of an 'open work' and places the experience of art in parallel with a different way of thinking about human relationships. Its processual origin, charged with irony, echoing private rituals, is intended to take us back to an elsewhere of the mind, to places of the unexpected, to a myth, a utopia more than anything else, while still remaining something physical. That elsewhere that is right here, in the present moment, it is enclosed in an instant and it transforms the physical space into an inner place. On this occasion too, Di Giampietro entrusts fabric and webs of threads with indecipherable and material writings as instruments to represent metaphors of relationship and connection.

The act of sewing the individual modules becomes research and knowledge of the self, of one's own origins and culture, emphasising the inseparable bond with an umbilical cord that reveals the material as the product of an assembly patiently sewn by hand. Sewing means above all 'time'. Deep and mental time, the fragility of something that stays together thanks to a knot as a beginning, easy to untie and to erase. What is the value of time of an intervention conceived and dedicated to a specific place? Of a moment in which the audience takes an active part, simply to conclude that only memory remains of it.The concept of place implied by this operation consists in fact in the idea of a fluid space where waves of possibilities alternate and, with magnetic displacement, allow the mind to create its own singular architecture made of light and colour. It is an operation that depolarises the centrality of the ego by implementing a perspective reversal. The curtain, as a furnishing accessory, has both an aesthetic functionality and a practical nature; it is a fragile element that places a subtle, penetrable and sensitive division between inside and outside.

The fragility of this condition, its being a slender diaphragm that protects the two founding situations of space, i.e. the 'inside' and the 'outside', is a metaphor for human fragility.So the thread that holds these unstable surfaces together represents a foothold, perhaps a landing place. Something that does not make you lose your way, that creates a 'net' conceived not as a trap but as something that prevents you from falling.

"DIPINTO MASTICATO" Casa degli Artisti, Milano 21.12.2022 (open studio)

In the smartphone era we are conditioned by a need for social visibility that impels us to connect to the internet daily, posting and sharing
personal content, selfies and images that speak of us, of our private and sentimental life, on social networks, sometimes even of our
sex life.
Why do we do that?
Why is it that all of us, today more than ever, we need so much social visibility and to show others our daily lives, to make it extraordinary,
like we’re always starring in a hit movie?
If we believe that we were not able to become what we aspired to be, we'll always feel a little unsatisfied and frustrated with who we
are. One can say that in this case we suffer from a crippled narcissism, that is, a feeling of self that contains a wound that asks to be
healed. We cure it every time we increase our value by posting content and images on social network, waiting for a collective approval,
which we return to other people out of gratitude, satisfying the same need for confirmation of value.

The "selfie" trend, which began with Myspace and was massive spread after 2010 with the iPhone's first front camera of the, should be
interpreted as a possible survival strategy in such difficult neoliberal conditions: a strategy that aims to produce and maintain an identity.
We are no longer obsessed with the idea of a hidden and contradictory human nature, which is supposedly located behind the soft
images of the "I". We know that everything the "New Age" used to call "me" and "inner life" was actually instilled by its social environment
(through lectures, books, films) and that the real "me" is just a receiver. This is the reason for the psychoanalysis decline as a cultural
method. The problem with the polarized debate about nature-education opposition is that it is impossible to ignore the role technology
is playing.
There’s no "me" outside the smartphone and the media, and there’s no "me" when there’s no internet connection. As for the "framing",
there is nothing left to discover or deconstruct: the most significant resources are highlighted, the brightness and the background are
controlled, the "duck face" no longer works, the mirrors are our friends, the blur is beautiful, works on the details, a sensual expression
is an advantage. (Antonio Lettieri- CABANAmad)

SPOTLIGHT 2022 ("In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes" - Andy Warhol -)

Having a soul means laughing while watching people die.
Werner Schwab - Fecal Dramas

Let's imagine for a moment that there can be a society that is able to reward its components so they can enjoy - with as much intensity
as possible - what they are experiencing. Those who can maximize the curve of optimizing pleasure, exist more than others, exist as
proof of a common hedonistic conviction that wants to eliminate pain and avoid boredom in the conquest of a soul. Those who will not
be able to enjoy will die flattened by the weight of laughter. We are in one of those worlds where it's possible to immediately understand
how life is just the chewed-up leftovers of an economic theory, in one of those places where no one is really interested in what happens
beyond their own sentimental living room; the other is just an opaque background, veiled by stains of a nonspecific color: bulky niches of
generic bodies move around us - although, in detail, they're different among them, all are nobody - beings disguised as good intentions
in the search of the right conversation, the right number of drinks, the right passage, the right sexual prey to bewitch with a certain
evocative attitude, only from the image of an end; all involved in a rag dance, with the intention of producing what we might call the
absolute value of a mere present.

Here, past and future are insignificant since the immediacy of contentment is the only valuable truth. Here, everyone has something
important to live by - in their own inner hole - while standing in grimaces of contentment, dancing, laughing, fucking, buying, drinking,
watching, listening, greeting, working and incessantly doing what they want, to empty the existence of meaning, making room for an
economic emotion in exponential growing.
Now Let's imagine that in this very world, there could be an experience machine capable of producing in the bodies that would enter
it, the maximum sensory activity of appreciation, in the total subtraction of the decision-making capacity of all those fully involved. The
experience is indistinguishable from life-size, and everyone can decide whether to live outside or inside the machine. However, if you
decide to enter, then it's the final choice.
At the bottom of this negative architecture, the prisoners of pleasure would be completely unable to answer the following question: to
what moral dimension do we appeal when we want to tell ourselves and others the value of what we are doing, or more generally, of all
that is within the meaning of sensory experience?

A: are we leaving this place?
B: and why never
A: you’re not gonna tell me you’re having fun
B: I think so
A: What makes you think that?
B: it’s raining, I love the rain
A: I think they’re spitting at us
B: Do you have anything better to propose?
A: No B: So shut up and enjoy the rain

Revolutionaries, teenagers, shamans and priests, criminals and actores, people with mental disorders or ashamed to express themselves. Each one of these types, can be connected by a small object, a symbol, that caracterizes a big part of humanity and, as mutable as its expressions over the centuries, it keeps changing and evolving: the mask. In most of the cases, in naming "mask", some of the first concepts that the word might remind, are probably centered in lie or at least, in mystery. We tend to interpret the mask as a method to hide ourselves from others and to not reveal one or more aspects of ourselves.

The roots of masquerading are old and universal (from the theatre of ancient Greece, to the several carnival rites) and have various interpretations, conflicting and common beliefs usually have a strong relevance in the general opinion: therefore, in an occidental modern world, in whose rituals are increasingly more explicit and appealing, is the mask really just one more method for lying and hiding? "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." Oscar Wilde You can also find a confirmation in those disguises that don't have a purpose other than playful and the celebration of the costume, like in the fields of historical restitutions, live dramatization or cosplay (from the crase of the terms costume and play, is the practice of recreating and wearing the clothes of a character from a movie, comics or animated series, and much more), all the activities and hobbies that lately seem to have attracted an increasingly diverse circle of fans.

In this case, the mask wants to be a method of personal expression that goes from the simple presentation of a figurine precisely made, until the creation of an entire world and new characters and, in a sort of mix of genders, the performance is connected.And theatrical art to ritual disguise. In the four examples presented in the exhibition, the mask seems to be capable of breaking the more common stereotype of masquerading, whose purpose is just to hide one's identity; in these situations, in fact, once worn, being physical or imaginary, it becomes a method to communicate (and not to hide) one's own condition, in the attempt of making understand something about one's self or of establishing a dialogue on a par.part of the "Interesses Maquillhados " exhibition, by CabanaMad, Lisbon

»An icon is painted on a light and the light is painted with gold.« (Pavel Florensky) The etymological meaning of an icon refers to the idea of apparition in which the gold that reflects it is closely connected with the mystery of a solar spectrum. This divine color has a specific name in iconographic art – Assist. An icon is not a painting, it is a sacred object, a miraculous object. The depicted figures should not delight the eye, the appearance must move away from the common beauty and the human nature.

This principle has made Alessandro di Giampietro willing to abstract the concept of an icon in an installation that is free of references to religious images, but respectful towards the sacredness and above all, legitimizes the theories of Pavel Florensky and the platonic metaphysics of beauty as light and splendor of an idea. In Florensky's works the platonic idea takes on the original character of a light that refers to a »live sight«, to a »gaze of a person«, to all those looks that, from the point of the view of the artist, will give life to the work. The golden structure determined by a central semi-sphere that represents divine illumination, framed by a screen, refers to a small sanctuary adorned with icons and candles that recalls a domestic dimension and the personal contemplation of the Byzantine icon, which is often labeled as a »beautiful or precious corner«. A protective shell, a golden cocoon, a secret casket that will envelop all of those who will participate in the ritual of sharing a special moment. The old historical icons reflect the sufferings and accomplishments of people, related to specific phenomena and historical events, revealing the inner world, purity and nobility of mind. In this era of social distancing »Assist«, as a symbol of contemporary iconography, represents the warmth of a hug that Alessandro di Giampietro wants to donate to the humanity. The most striking feature of Byzantine icons is perhaps »the reversed perspective«, in which the lines of force are aimed at one or more centers located in front of and outside of the icon itself, in the direction of an observer. In the artist's golden installation, the concept of the reversed perspective is represented by a human figure moving within the installation in the alchemical ritual of preparing a unique drink for the guests, as a moment of relief from suffering and a place to find some piece and quiet. In »Assist« the meaning of the icon of the Divine Maternity as a mother's embrace of her own son and the meaning of the icon of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple as a sacred meeting, blend together in the golden reflections of the structure in which each spectator, seeing his or her mirrored image, becomes a part of the installation.

Assist 3d project Cristiana Di Giampietro, text Laura Fonovich, musicians Vida Voyage , Gino Lucente, Borut Savski, Bostjan Leskovcek.

Network ”conceived during the three years of residence in Ljubljana, the house is trasformen into a large living room, into a temporary space

that taking the form of a large curtain made with fragments of heterogeneous fabric collected by the artist during his movements between Italy and the Balkans

reflects the idea of home as a living and dynamic organism capable of changing and transforming over time, in an open space capable of containing

The project featured in the group space of the 8th floor of the Avtotehna skyscraper at Bavarski dvor will be a spatial implosion of Cirkulacija2. An exaggeration to the limits of over-saturation. The main line of (over)saturation will draw on light sources, using both simple and complex movable mechanisms, producing images as shadows (shadow play), transparencies, scans, flickering. The sound will be picked up using light sensors on shadowy surfaces and directly processed, thus establishing a closed (cybernetic) system. The aim is to destabilize the viewing point (observer's / viewer's eye) and to match that with a corresponding physical feeling. Space is pulsating/breathing, up is down, left is right, spinning in all directions – an anti-gravitational experiment? Moving around is by all means desired – participants/visitors are part of the projection-lit space. Up is down, down is up, left is right, right is left, inside is outside, and outside is inside… these equations present direct opposites in the language of man – contradictions. Perhaps they point to contemporary ambiguities – possibilities, hybrid realities. Once firm constellations, speaking the truth, become burnt within – energetically and interpretatively imploded. What is looked for are new kinds of firmness. Until then, zero-gravity is ruled by space – space without weight, contents without significance – in their exceedingly relative and limited coordinates of validity. However, perhaps precisely such a random space is alive – freed from the burdens of ideology and unambiguity. An obscure and dark forest, where even the shadows are strangely dangerous.