Frangiflutti

Magazzino is happy to announce Frangiflutti, the fourth solo exhibition by Alessandro Piangiamore at the gallery. The exhibition follows Quaranta (2016), Testimone di fatti ordinari (2011) and Una questione privata (2007), and features new works realized for the occasion.

The title Frangiflutti (Italian for Breakwater) is clearly adherent to Piangiamore’s poetic, ever oriented in a “reparatory” function of arts, some sort of non-defensive escapism, an evasion (or a filter) from the constant flux of images that the information age feeds us. On the other hand, Piangiamore reaffirms, in his work, the power of imagination as such, its ability to stop, to deviate, to stem the river of stimulations that erode our capacity of analysis. It is interesting how, in his research, the artist does not draw from a proper form of imagery but rather, directs his glance on the natural, quotidian and contingent world, that is, to something we constantly have in front of our eyes, and then re-elaborate it into forms that overturn its perception.

In the exhibition, a collection of soil (collected by the artist over his travels), is transformed in a series of almost-monochrome panels, that appear as finished simulacra but do suggest a passage of state, into which the matter is naked, pure, and in its pureness it unfolds all its poetry. A poetry spoken through grains, substances, colors, without premeditation or whim, without a properly aesthetic purpose. Il Cacciatore di Polvere reflects on the cycle of matter in a paradoxical way, restituting it as a celibate machine, stripped of premises and developments. A continuous incipit, rational in its aspect and forms, that responds to the irrational obsession of showing the visual power of what our eyes normally do ignore.

Similarly, but through a completely different visual outcome, the series of photographs Acqua negli Occhi () portrays landscape through an ice sheet, used as a filter. If in Il Cacciatore di Polvere our glance is obviously turned to the ground, in Acqua negli Occhi the ground does not exist, only the colors (and the substance) of an illuminated sky. The filter becomes a shape, a suggestion of creatures or a landscape, over a “scenario” that is infinite in his space, depth and colors.

Sky, as a suggestion, is also present in the series Qualche uccello si perde nel cielo here shown in large formats, into which a nocturne of stars is populated by falling feathers. The typical processual nature of Piangiamore’s sculptures, where the premises and the final output of the art are outside the artist’s direct control, is related to the mechanical process of printing. The deep blue is substance more than a color, paper is not only a mere support and each work becomes the image of a unique, elusive, unrepeatable.

The exhibition concludes with a protean work, Giove Pittore di Farfalle where seven glass sculptures, polished to remind ice blocks and animated by lights, are remotely handled by a demiurge (we can imagine it either as a machine or a human, it’s up to us to decide which one of the two to face) that randomly sets their hue and intensity. The rainbow, ever present in Alessandro’s work, becomes – maybe once and for all – something restless, shapeless, that doesn’t respond to any preordained logic even though occurring within the boundaries of objects and forms.