Gianni Piacentino
dal 1/3/2004 al 24/4/2004
Segnalato da
1/3/2004
Gianni Piacentino
Esso Gallery, New York
'With a 36-year career and more than 80 one-man and group exhibitions to his credit, Gianni Piacentino has been hidden in plain sight. His work resists simple categorization and all but invites misinterpretation, a circumstance that may in part account for his persistent low profile. Often defying prevailing currents, Piacentino arrived at certain artistic issues ahead of the crowd, and stayed to more deeply explore some of them long after the crowd had moved on.' (Marcia E. Vetrocq - Art in America)
Jennifer and Filippo Fossati are honoured to announce the opening of the solo exhibition by Italian artist Gianni Piacentino. A catalogue is available.
"That the male of the species is genetically wired to love fast-moving, motorized vehicles has yet to be scientifically proved, but there is much anedoctal evidence for the hypothesis. A case in point is the Italian sculptor Gianni Piacentino, who started out in Arte Povera but turned in the late 60's to making elegant Minimalist paintings and sculptures. Then he began to integrate his other career - as a sidecar motorcycle racer and custom motorcycle painter - into his art, creating sleek, semi-abstract representation of racing cars and airplanes. This retrospective selection of works from 1966 to the present is an unexpected pleasure."
(Ken Johnson - The New York Times)
"With a 36-year career and more than 80 one-man and group exhibitions to his credit, Gianni Piacentino has been hidden in plain sight. His work resists simple categorization and all but invites misinterpretation, a circumstance that may in part account for his persistent low profile. Often defying prevailing currents, Piacentino arrived at certain artistic issues ahead of the crowd, and stayed to more deeply explore some of them long after the crowd had moved on." (Marcia E. Vetrocq - Art in America)
"For the Italian Futurists, who celebrated velocity, tumult, and the headlong thrust toward tomorrow, a speeding car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. For Turin-based sculptor Gianni Piacentino, the choice between a Ferrari and a classical marble might not be so simple. An automobile racing by assumes an ideal smoothness and formal simplicity not unlike that of a stone figure worn by centuries of weather and the touch of thousands of hands, and such are the forms suggested simultaneously by Piacentino's elongated carlike (or airplane-like, or motorcycle-like) objects, which escape immediate perception to enter the permanence of memory. As a wheel spinning at a certain rate no longer seems to be moving, Piacentino's sculptures capture that moment of strange perceptual flux when speed turns into stasis and dynamism into immutability--just as they evoke the affective tipping point where the rush toward the future becomes nostalgia for the past." (Barry Schwabsky - ArtForum)
"Similar to Jorge Pardo, Jim Isserman and Andrea Zittel of the recent generation of artists, Piacentino's interest in design is not only as a question of taste, but how each era produces a recognizable signature style which encodes its projected values and standards. In turn, he uses design elements tinged with nostalgia and patina not only to remind us of that optimistic moment when flight and speed held our imaginations, promising us escape, and a brighter future in the face of depression and war, but also that the present always seeks to cast the future in its own idealized, though anachronistic image. It is perhaps in recognition of this situation that Piacentino continues to vacillate between making things that seeks to metaphorically represent its own transit form thing to sign on one hand and that thing that might give representation only to its self, on the other. Ostensibly, he leaves the viewer with the task of negotiating between these two propositions." (Saul Ostrow from the catalogue)
Gianni Piacentino born 1945, Coazze (Turin), Italy. He lives and works in Turin, Italy. His work has been shown extensively in Europe since 1966 in public spaces such as the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels (Belgium), the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (Spain); the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna and Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (Italy); the National Galerie in Berlin, the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst in Bremen and Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund; (Germany); PS1 in New York among others and in private galleries such as Galleria Sperone, Galleria C. Stein, Galleria Rosa Sandretto in Turin; Galleria Rino Costa, Valenza; Galleria Toselli, Galleria Arte Borgogna, Milan; Lia Rumma in Naples (Italy); Onnasch Galerie, in Cologne, Berlin and in New York; O.K. Harris, New York; Galerie König, Geneve (CH); Galerie Di Meo, Paris among others.
In 1977 he was invited to participate in Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany and in 1993 to the XLV Biennale of Venice, Italy; his work is in the permanent public collections of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Turin and the Museo di Reggio Emilia (Italy), the Power Institute of Fine Arts, Sidney (Australia), the National Galerie in Berlin and the Neuen Museums Weserburg, Bremen (Germany) among others.
Image: LIGHT-BLUE PEARL RECORD VEHICLE (M.S. CHEQUERED FRONT), 1986-1993
Nitro-acrylic enamel on "medium density" and resin, nickel-plated brass
cm. 21,5 x 220 x 11
Opening Reception: Tuesday, March 2 from 6 to 8 p.m.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Contact Information: Jennifer Bacon or Filippo Fossati
tel. (212) 560-9728
fax (212) 560-9729
ESSO Gallery
531 West 26th Street, 4th floor New York NY 10001