Rea! Art Fair 2021 Catalogue by Ilaria Castelli

Art Fair

ReA !

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ReA! Art Fair 2021 Catalogue Published by REA ARTE Associazione culturale www.reafair.com info@reafair.com Copyright: ©REA ARTE Brand design: Davide Marcianesi Graphic design: Ilaria Castelli ISBN: 9788894571417

CATALOGUE

INTRODUCTION

REA ART FAIR! 2021

Our mission is bringing art closer to the general public and doing it in a way that supports the emerging talents. But what is art, actually? Ever since the 1900s we have learned to accept that anything can become art. There is no practice, object or situation that can not be recognized as relevant to art. As humans existing within the economy, technology, in the everyday - we live in the concept of modernity with its progress and principle of constant obsolescence and abandonment. The thing that sets art apart - is our collective expectation that it will outlive its own, and consequently, our own time - allowing us to explore the concept of eternity. The Fil rouge turns blue - the signature colour of ReA!, accompanying the entire exhibition flow, which mimics an architectural structure of a “piazza”, a place of democratic gathering - welcoming anyone who decides to join the conversation. We believe that good art can not only be created, seen and appreciated outside of galleries and museums, but we also think that its price does not define its aesthetic or intellectual value. We see art ownership as a way to engage in a form of political and reasoned existence, connecting with an unexplored space of ideas. Own art, empower artists, explore ideas.

CATALOGUE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

AMADEI ANDREA ANTONELLO ENRICO BATTISTELLO FRANCESCO BERAGNOLI ROBERTO BERTOLDO ELIAS BERZAGHI ILARIA BIOLO MARTINA BOCHKOVA ANNA BRUGOLA FRANCESCA BURATTINI FRANCESCO CACCIUTTOLO GIULIA CAENEN JOEP CASALI MATTEO CASELLATO CATERINA CECCONI MELONI EDVIGE CELLINI GIORGIO CHERNAKOVA NATALIYA COLÒ ELISABETTA COLTEANU MATEI VLADIMIR CONFORTI LORENZO CONTI STEFANO CURATELA PLACEBO CZIKA KRISZTINA DAVIDE SARA DEL FABRO CAMILLA DELIGIO ELEONORA DI FERDINANDO NICCOLÒ

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REA ART FAIR! 2021

DI MASSIMO ALESSANDRO DONAGGIO GIANMARCO DOUGLAS FERGUSON FREYA DUFOOR ARTHUR DVORSCAK PATRIK ESPOSITO MANUEL EYEROD ART COLLECTIVE FASOLI ILARIA FEDOROVA VITALIIA FIKOS FIORAMONTI SOFIA FISCHER JORINDE FLORIO LORENA FRACASSO DAVIDE GIUSEPPE GIACCIO DARIAS CARLA GIOACCHINI FRANCESCO GIORDANI SILVIA GODINO ERIKA GÓMEZ LÓPEZ ROMEO GROOT TOBIAS GUARNERI DUCCIO GUKUN ALEXANDER GURGONE CAMILLA HARLACHER LUCA HAUGE LAUREL HOLST SEVANA IKUM BASIL

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CATALOGUE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INCULTE REJETON ITALIANO ANGELA KING SAM LENNON OLIVIA CONCETTA LOCATELLI GIULIO LONGA MARTA LUZI ANDREA MACHADO LUAN MARQUES FABIEN MATTIA GIORGIO MINELLI ILARIA MIOTTO ILARIA MIRATA NOEMI MONTI BENEDETTA MONZALI ERICA MUSSI FRANCESCA NARDULLI DOMINGO NUVOLA CAMERA PACE ARIANNA PACUCCI SARA PARK CHANBYUL PASSANTINO PAOLA PAVAN PAOLO PIGNOTTI GIADA PILUSI ALICE PIRAS YARNO POLLONI FEDERICO

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REA ART FAIR! 2021

POZZATO FRANCESCO RAMUNNO MARIKA RAPOSO PIRES RAFAEL REGUZZONI EVA RESSETTA CHIARA RINALDI ELEONORA RUOFF AIMEE SALZGEBER LUCIA SERI GIULIA SIMEONI ILARIA SOARDI THOMAS STRATTON PATRICK VALERIO CLAUDIO VELDHUIS STEF VITALI PIETRO VOLONTERIO MATTEO VULLO FRANCESCO WILSON STUART MEL ZHENG XU

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GUEST ARTISTS: ARANI FEDERICO SCHIAVONE MARCO

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ARTIST N°01

FROM ITALY

AMADEI ANDREA

Andrea Amadei studied Theoretical Philosophy with prof. Carlo Sini. He has worked for several years in the documentary world, writing and producing several films, documentaries and series in collaboration with major international broadcasters. Then he started to get into commercial communication. After he quit his job, he created YAY.RED. “Art has become a narrative, while in reality, it is a ritual. Art is sacred. It is a dark and humid cave where a frightening miracle happens. It is a world that opens up and presents itself, the world in the figure of a man who makes the world into the figure of a thing through figures, symbols, rhythm and dances. Art “is a protest against a world that already existed, but without which the protest could not have taken shape” (G. Bataille, Lascaux. The birth of art, Mimesis, 2007). Art that communicates is not a negation of art but a negation of humanity; and becomes, at best, interior decoration. YAY.RED is opening a marketplace on Amazon. To regain possession of the current public space. Just as the town square was born to host the market, the trade, and then became an arena for discussion, debate, politics - “scendiamo in piazza” -, so YAY.RED wants to occupy the private but now public space of Amazon: a gallery of products, with videos and works for sale, which uses digital tools, born for commerce, for propaganda, now sensible, of the discussion of commerce, of its absence of meaning.” YAY.RED is an honest company; the company is an artwork. YAY. RED is anarcho-capitalism happening. — Text by Pelin Zeytinci

1 YAY.RED. MEGA UNIONE SUPREMA 2021 Video Installation

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°02

FROM ITALY

ANTONELLO ENRICO

In Castelfranco Veneto in 1995, Antonello Enrico attended the Art School of Treviso and graduated with honours in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 2019. In 2017 he was one of the founders of the Default collective, committed to exhibiting his works in unconventional places (San Servolo, Monfumo, Venice, Trento, Novara). On these projects, he begins to focus his research on three aspects between their correlates: sound, light and movement. In 2019 he participated in the international Artstays festival in Slovenia. The same year it was selected as a finalist at the XIV edition of the National Prize of the Arts of the Italian Academies and the Salvi Prize in Sassoferrato (Ancona). In 2020 he presented in Treviso the work “Decomposition” in the “Orli” exhibition and “Sound Machine” in the “ZOONOSI” exhibition at CavallinoTreporti (Ve). At the end of 2020 in Agropoli, in the province of Salerno, he won the prize in the sculpture-installation section with the work “Work day for 2” in the international competition “ArtKeys02”. His work presents three preponderant aspects that always relate to each other: sound, light and movement. Every two seconds, two lights light up until they all light up. The scheme is as follows: 2-4-6-8-10-12-14-18-14-12-10-8-6-4-2. The route is in a loop. This rhythm has been set up expressly to describe the stereotypical way of working inside a factory, where we see that the repetition of an action in a sounded and constantly repetitive way, everything is repeated non-stop in a loop; that is, it starts all over again always from scratch. An endless circle, always the same that leads to nothing but made only to pass the time in an aseptic way without any logic. The eight bars represent the eight working hours, and being sixteen indicate two working days. — Text by Pelin Zeytinci

1 Work day for 2 2020 Multisensory installation Variable width from 4.50 to 5 meters Height 1.80 meters

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°03

FROM BELGIUM

BATTISTELLO FRANCESCO

Francesco Battistello (b. 1994) is an Italian artist currently based in Belgium. His passion for Fine Art began while he was still at school, where instead of listening to the lessons, he invented stories and illustrated them. During his high school years, he got acquainted with Street Art, his interest in painting continued to grow, and after graduating from a technological high school, he began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. In 2020, he obtained an MA in Painting, followed by participation in a group exhibition at an A+a Gallery. For Battistello, the development of painting translates into constant questioning of the techniques he uses and his discoveries within the canvas space. The pictorial elements he develops are constantly reworked as he rebuilds the ongoing works. Francesco’s canvases follow two different storylines: one consists of narration of the represented images, while the other is a combination of all the elements that make the artworks - the mistakes and the choices made, thus forming a pictorial surface rich in events made of colour and shapes. In his work, substantial tension is present, generated by the reworking of images and historical painting techniques, which combines with a constant dialogue which is achieved through contemporary painting using the colours and the treatment of the pictorial surface. When talking about the paintings entitled Uomo Nero and The Flying Dutchman, the artist underlines - I develop my pictorial research through families of works, that is, works with common characteristics; these two works both have as their subject representations of boats, which is a recurring theme in my research. The subject of the ship acted as a starting point for Uomo nero painting; however, it ended up fading, giving way to the central black figure. The painting can be described as a collage, and the step towards materiality was a valuable one, as it led to the surface becoming more varied and the image itself rhythmic. The title refers to the Black Man poem by Sergei Yesenin, a 19th-century Russian lyric poet, that Francesco was reading while developing the painting - he found the same feeling of an enigmatic, sinister figure that connected his paintings to the poem: [...] My friend, my friend, How sick I am. Nor do I know Whence came this sickness. [...] Black man Sits by me on the bed all night, Won’t let me sleep. [...] — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 Uomo Nero [The Black Man] 2020 Acrylic paint and collage on canvas 25,5 x 20 cm

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°04

FROM ITALY

BERAGNOLI ROBERTO

Roberto Beragnoli was born in Florence in 1990. From a very young age, he has been involved in illustration and painting through personal research focused on satire and figurative art. In his early years, he was influenced in his creative growth by a direct relationship with various artists, such as his uncle Sergio Beragnoli and the cartoonist Lele Vianello, historical collaborator of Hugo Pratt. The latter provided him with the theoretical foundations of drawing and colouring. Artificial intelligence and algorithms are the primary tools with which Roberto Beragnoli realizes his ideas, maintaining solid contact with the art created by manipulating materials and spaces through traditional techniques. His works connect physical mediums, sculpted or painted, with the digital world. Although rich in technological elements, his works often aim to dialogue with previous artists and the history of art in general, highlighting the continuity and, where possible, the fractures. Materials are works that aim to investigate simulations of digital forms and materials subjected to various forces and manipulated in their internal characteristics. This work is then transformed into a physical object, in this case, a polystyrene sculpture. One could not ignore the hardness of the marble, the malleability of the wax, the friability of the plaster, and the fibrousness of the wood. With all these elements, one could only collaborate to drag them to the point sought by the author or to the intrinsic breaking point of the objects themselves (Archangel Sassolino). — Text by Pelin Zeytinci

1 Materials NFT+PRINT SCHERMO 72’, stampa 30*50cm

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°05

FROM ITALY

BERTOLDO ELIAS

Elias Bertoldo (b. 1994) is an Italian artist currently based in Modena, holding an MA in Painting from the Brera Academy. His interests lie in the dynamics of colour, and so his research started with completing a series of works that evoke virtual devices animated by light pulses. In 2018 Bertoldo was featured in a book by Ignazio Gadaleta entitled Points and Filaments of Colour in Italian Painting From Divisionism to Today, which focused on exploring theoretical and formal affinities, specifically in terms of language microstructures, among the protagonists of Italian painting from Giuseppe Pellizza to the present day. His works are reflections on the essence of painting through the experience of light. Elias conducts in-depth research on the logic of seeing, explicitly concerning the current habits of image virtualisation. While looking at his artworks, it is essential to search for current chromo-luminist arrangements, which can only be conceived artificially because of the electroluminescence of monitor LEDs and photoluminescence phenomena. The reflection on the complexity of the act of perception remains of continuous interest to the artist as well as the consequent implications on the emotional sphere. With that in mind, he develops consistently elaborated pictorial planes and constructs colour very rationally. Lately, Bertoldo has joined both painting methodologies and current imaging processes by manipulating colour as either pigment or digital data, resulting in virtual paintings. He explains: I try to evoke through the mere use of colour visions of icons, computer graphics and monitors’ LED backlighting. At the same time, I aim to make the form of light itself visible through the presence of “the simultaneous”, “the dissemination”, “the intermittent”, “the mobility”, and “the radiating”. The close relationship we have with multimedia and self-luminous digital devices conditions our way of feeling, interpreting and experiencing reality, so my work wants to explore and reinterpret those visual stimuli through the point of view of light, to possibly renew painting. The pictorial plane of the Dispersione di Luminescenza is scattered with flashes of light, triggering gravitational masses and making a reference to stellar phenomenology. The artwork’s space is fragmented, modulated to give maximum breadth, going towards virtual dimensional infinity. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 Dispersione di Luminescenza 2021 Pencil on paper 50 x 65 cm

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°06

FROM ITALY

BERZAGHI ILARIA

REA ART FAIR! 2021

Ilaria Berzaghi (b. 1999) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Milan. She is currently completing her BA in Fine Art (Painting) at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Berzaghi’s artworks are based on the intimate aspects, often melancholic, that are dear to her - she’s interested in capturing those delicate everyday moments and transferring them onto the pictorial surface: I decide what to depict with selectivity, as my eyes, attentive and solicited, memorize details, objects and subjects and then my hands concretize everything onto the canvas through veils of light colour. Through her works, Ilaria is searching for an ideal imaginary place, going with the steady flow of time, which becomes stratified, much like her paintings. Senza Titolo 1 is a rigorous composition made of angles and shadows created by those angles, and it is them that set and direct the viewer’s perception. The multiple squares that dominate the composition immediately make us wonder what we’re looking at - is it an artwork inside the artwork? Is it some box, and if yes, what’s inside of it? Or perhaps it’s an empty photo frame, so where is the photo? The muted colour palette ensures that the squares visually interact in a subtle way, instead of clashing, creating a calm, nostalgic feeling. This painting is a perfect example of the moments that become captured by the artist - the image is, in fact, something that she sees every day when she raises her gaze; it’s a ceiling lamp, a simple, even to some extent, trivial object, fixed, almost permanently to another flat surface, yet depicted like that it turns into an intriguing, mysterious, intimate item. Here, Berzaghi choses to reappropriate this household object that resides in our homes and turn it into a symbol of domesticity by turning it off - extrapolating it from its original function, and inserting it into a new dimension through painting. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 Senza titolo 1 2021 Oil on canvas 60 x 60 cm

ARTIST N°07

FROM ITALY

BIOLO MARTINA

Martina Biolo (b. 1996) is an Italian artist currently based in Padua; she has completed her MA in Fine Art at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts in 2021. Biolo has participated in numerous collective exhibitions in Venice, a city that undoubtedly influences her works. The artist’s research investigated everyday objects intending to extrapolate, through the artworks, the stories that reside within them, focusing on symbolic, cultural, and tradition-related aspects. As Biolo describes it - My artistic practice revolves around the communicative needs of the artworks themselves, oscillating between sculpture and painting. The goal is to make the materials that she uses speak, to give them a voice that the viewer can hear and comprehend, but also to bring to life the speech itself - as between all of us and everything that surrounds us exists a cultural link, which is manifested through sharing stories, experiences and symbols. The object, therefore, becomes a witness of said link, and from that springs the possibility of building a place of confrontation that acts as a liberation tool for ethnography - the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures. The artwork is here to describe people, their experiences - it is a certain cultural manifestation revealed through its materiality. Botte da Orbi is a diptych made with acrylic paint on latex; latex itself is an incredibly tactile material that inevitably reminds us of skin. Even though its layers are pierced, they don’t seem to trigger any violent or traumatic associations inside me; instead, it makes me think of delicacy, tenderness, care. Clusters of mahogany and ruby reds, alongside the darker, cooler shades of Sacramento green and eggplant purple, are perceived as imprints of the passing soul, or perhaps it’s the imprint that we have on other people’s lives. The diptych is certainly telling a story, and I’d like to hear it. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1a-1b Botte da Orbi (diptych) 2021 Acrylic paint on latex 64 x 43 cm each

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°08

FROM RUSSIA

BOCHKOVA ANNA

Anna Bochkova was born in 1995 in Rostov-On-Don, Russia. She is a visual artist who lives between Vienna and Hamburg. After studying set design and directing, Anna Bochkova continued her education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Hfbk in Hamburg. Her works have been exhibited on several occasions around Europe, including Erste Foundation and Exile Gallery in Vienna and Spazio SERRA in Milan. She is collaborating with the Latvian Academy of art and occasionally curates exhibitions. Her next upcoming show entitled ‘the Room’ will take place in an industrial art space in Brno, CZ. Bochkova’s approach is primarily sensory and aims to incorporate thought through the performative practice of material production. For the artist, it is essential to decode the conceptual elements and present them to the viewer through her sculptures. Anna Bochkova works with various materials and techniques, such as metal, ceramics, plaster, papier-mache, stone, textiles, painting and drawing. All these different expression strategies help the artist develop a visual statement that becomes the manifestation of her research. Anna Bochkova’s interests lie in the field of space and its construction. By creating different installation artworks, the artist creates heterotrophic and utopian spaces in which themes such as care, mutual solidarity, and support are contained and reflected in urban and private spaces. Her personal experience plays a vital role in interpreting such themes that often reflect parts of her culture. Venera6 is a visual vocabulary based on scenic space. As she builds up the dramaturgy, where the characters are her sculptures, the artist proposes an architectural narrative that reflects on the themes of memory and migration. The installation creates a parallel universe: the artist’s personal world, in which we can also reflect on ourselves through a small mirror placed at the bottom of the sculpture. It is not accidental that a mirror is placed inside the work since it is used as a device through which the external reality can get in contact with the inside of the structure but nonetheless exists only as an image of it. We are all immigrants to some extent, just like the artist, and so we can really experience the work - its utopia, its frontiers, its potential and its limitations. Heterotopic spaces become a space for reflection and criticism of existing hierarchies. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1 Venera6 2021 Metal chains, plaster, aluminium pipes, paper mache, wire, aluminium leaf 140 x 55 x 46 cm

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°09

FROM ITALY

BRUGOLA FRANCESCA

Francesca Brugola (1996, Carate Brianza, MB) graduated in Painting at the Academy of Brera in Milan, in 2019. She spends an Erasmus period at the ENSA Dijon, FR, where she is invited by Bruno Rousselot to participate in the group exhibition Rivières sans retour at the Galerie Interface, Dijon, in 2019. In 2020 she is accepted at the Manchester School of Art where she is currently attending an MFA in Fine Art. Upon her return to Italy later in 2020, she will attend a course in ancient ceramic techniques at Atelier Pucci in Urbino. During this period, she realises in situ and land art works, including installations, videos and performances. At the moment, Brugola is developing a research project related to you’re getting warmer. how to cohabit with the Otherness in a regenerative way?, supervised by researchers and artists at the MMU, Manchester. The artist’s research follows the theories of intersectional feminism and New Materialism, she is interested in environmentalist politics and more generally in posthumanist philosophies and the fight against species discrimination. For Way out the artist took inspiration from an Etruscan figure found on a vase of that time. The figure represents a ritual, probably called Truia. This ritual is still shrouded in shadow, but it is possible that it was a rite of passage for young men to become knights. The original figure shows two riders with the figure of the stork or the partridge on the shield; these animals are both connected to sacred dances. Brugola removes the human figure from the drawing. What appears is the figure of a stork or partridge set in a horse. Almost a symbol of a fusion or of an absolute collaboration. These two animals, which become a single creature, drag a maze. The labyrinth is the symbol of a critical and cryptic present, from which you can find the way out only relying on unexpected collaborations. Francesca relies on ancient languages and proposes them to a contemporary audience. In this action there is no attempt to appropriate a certain language, but the awareness of the evocative force of these images and therefore, the desire to create a contemporary discourse and a collective imagination around these.

1 Way out 2020 Pottery 23 x 29,5 cm

REA ART FAIR! 2021

Francesca relies on ancient languages and proposes them to a contemporary audience. In this action there is no attempt to appropriate a certain language, but the awareness of the evocative force of these images and therefore, the desire to create a contemporary discourse and a collective imagination around these.

ARTIST N°10

FROM ITALY

BURATTINI FRANCESCO

Francesco Burattini was born in Ancona in 1994. After obtaining a BA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino, he decided to continue studying at the same academy. Following a series of group exhibitions held in different Italian cities in June 2020, he inaugurated his first solo show, Everyone needs a first time at PXL MAD in Hassel, Belgium. In 2021 he graduated in Contemporary Art Management, presenting as his final project a research thesis focused on the concept of “artist as the curator” accompanied by an interview with Darren Bader. Burattini has a strong interest in the analysis of the dynamics of the space and how the different elements can interact and appear, which is expressed in his works with the special attention paid to the functional properties and aesthetic of the objects that he selects for the realisation of the final pieces – my process is rooted in the pop culture of the ‘90s, my childhood, and vaguely recalls nostalgic aspects of that decade. Attentive to all those aspects of everyday life that often go unnoticed, Francesco reinterprets individual factors that exert particular fascination, creating new imagery that can be seen from various points of view. The artist analyses domesticity and explores more complex relational dynamics, such as those of the urban periphery, giving life to pictorial and installation art compositions as actual celebrations of stories that the objects themselves have to tell. The suburbs are the protagonist of the work 841 DWI, and the place of interest here is the construction site: “the painting maintains the cornerstones of my pictorial practice – it’s a composition that draws inspiration from graphic layout, focusing on the balance of complementary colours, the use of broken elements and is consequently composed of multiple planes’’. In each of his works, the artist inserts a detail that subtly reveals the origin of the compositional idea, which in this case is the title. 841 DWI was written on a sign hanging at the construction site entrance that attested to 841 days without injuries - the number of days spent without having suffered accidents at work. — Text by Laura Pieri

1 841 DWI 2021 Mixed media 135 x 92 cm

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°11

FROM ITALY

CACCIUTTOLO GIULIA

Giulia Cacciuttolo (1991) was born in Rome and began her artistic career at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome before moving to London and continuing her education in Painting at Wimbledon College of Art, later obtaining an MA in Visual and Performing Arts at Central Saint Martins (London). She has received several recognitions - such as the Mona Hatoum Bursary, the MiAL&METRO Mentorship and the DLA Piper Mural Commission – and has participated in exhibitions, both collective and solo, in several European countries. She currently lives and works in London. Giulia’s practice starts from analogue photography that becomes integrated into her installations through interaction with materials of different nature and various kinds of supports. The photography, however, is never presented in its original and trivial form, although it is central to the practice of Giulia Cacciuttolo, who does not define herself as a photographer but delineates photography as her primary means of expression, a starting point rather than the result. The final rendering of the work remains unknown to the artist until its formalization since Cacciuttolo constantly experiments with different materials and techniques. Working with the concept of memory, heritage, past, both collective and intimate, the artist has always felt attracted by translucent and semi-transparent materials, malleable and superimposed, which allow a transversal reading of the different layers that the artist creates. The work presented at the Fair is an exceptional piece, as Giulia usually works with black and white photographs and analogue Matrix. In this case, the artist wanted to experiment by taking a digital archive, created after travelling to Japan as a base for the artwork, playing with colour modification in post-production. The piece is also linked to the concept of landscape, and in some way, the artwork itself becomes an archive of memories of the communities that experience them. The cast that pins the printed image onto the ground is a fundamental element in the artist’s practice. As well as photography, Cacciuttolo sees the possibility of collecting palpable traces of organic objects as she gathers the visual material. The interpretation of the artwork remains open to the public, projecting its experience and its legacy of the Memory Archive. It lingers under the veil, material and conceptual, which never allows for a fixed reading of the figures that the artist wanted to investigate, leaving the apprehension of the artwork to the audience. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1-2 Conundrum 2020 Raw clay with root imprints on poly film 59 x 84 cm

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°12

FROM NETHERLANDS

CAENEN JOEP

Joep Caenen (b. 1991) is a Dutch artist who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Maastricht with a BA in Fine Arts in 2019. Since 2018 he has participated in a series of group exhibitions, and the year 2020 has been a flourishing one for the artist, as he took part in many events including CineSud, Limburg Film Festival in Venlo, Bijenkorf at Room on the Roof and Marres and Limburg Biënnalena in Maastricht. His artistic practice shifts between painting and installation, with which he gives life to real participatory moments of involvement and social sharing. Often finding inspiration in everyday life, Caenen creates works in which he combines moments derived from worldly experiences with childhood memories, particularly those referring to the time he lived in Africa. In his artistic practice, the artist observes objects, moments, people, and environments and goes beyond their form and appearance. His installations - or as he likes to call them, social sculptures - explore the various possibilities of exchange between people and the world, with the primary objective being to involve the audience actively. Simple games and daily activities present in our society often accompany these installations: through the ordinary and the universally accessible, the public is invited to participate, dialogue and experience a moment of sharing.

1 Wishing Well 2021 Site-specific installation

REA ART FAIR! 2021

The artwork entitled Wishing Well is an interactive installation that refers to the tradition of throwing a coin in a fountain in exchange for a wish and good luck; inside the fountain, there are pools with signs that read: Patience, Joy, Love and Blessing. These categories are derived from autobiographical experiences that refer to the time the artist has spent in Nigeria and, in particular, to the practice of naming one’s child to reflect certain character traits later in life. Wishing Well invites the visitors to take a coin and then choose a pond that attracts them the most: by simply throwing this coin into the pond, they can invoke the corresponding trait for themselves or someone dear. The act of participating in this simple ritual can be considered a broader gesture. As visitors engage with the installation, the number of coins and wishes put towards the artwork grows. The combined energy and concentration create a connection between every desire; together, they represent a perspective, a wish for positivity and a better future. — Text by Laura Pieri

ARTIST N°13

FROM ITALY

CASALI MATTEO

REA ART FAIR! 2021

Matteo Casali (b. 1994) is an Italian artist based in Venice, where he’s currently completing his MA in Fine Art (Painting) at the Academy of Fine Arts. Casali has taken part in various group exhibitions, solo shows and workshops, and completed an art residency organised by the Magazzeno Art Gallery. His works are also featured in diverse publications and catalogues. Matteo’s research, which he calls The Synthetic Reality, is based on the study of the human body inside of a non-place. The concept is of significant interest to the artist and was introduced by Marc Auge - a contemporary French anthropologist, who in his essay and book of the same title Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity coined the phrase non-place to refer to spaces where concerns of relationships, history and identity are erased. Examples of a non-place would be a motorway, a hotel room, an airport or a supermarket. Casali’s artworks focus on figures, confined or perhaps simply residing within the surface of the canvas. In his Orrizonte tra Quattro Mura we observe the figure, confined within the non-space, hopefully looking towards the horizon. The space or rather a non-place in which the figures from the artist’s paintings are placed is synthetic and almost virtual; they lose their identities and are seeking a new one. Identifying with those figures comes naturally to me, as we all feel lonely and suspended in a kind of void sometimes due to various life circumstances; this feeling of loneliness and isolation acts as a basis for Matteo’s paintings. When it comes to technical depiction, strong contrasts of colours, especially between the abstract background and the preliminary figure, forces it to blend with the entity it’s placed within and is, therefore, the visual manifestation of the concept that interests the artist. The scenes depicted in Casali’s paintings derive from his everyday life, with a prominent contrast between calmness and tension. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 Orizzonte tra quattro mura 2020 Acrylic and oil on canvas 120 x 100 cm

ARTIST N°14

FROM ITALY

CASELLATO CATERINA There is a gradual alteration of normality, which becomes more insistent and dominant, casting a veil of restlessness.

Caterina Casellato (b. 1995) is an Italian currently based in Venice. She was involved in various shows, including the exhibition of finalists of the Nocivelli Prize in Brescia, the collective exhibition entitled Extra Ordinario in Venezia Marghera and a solo exhibition Visual Mutations in Conegliano in 2020. In 2021 she completed an MA in Fine Art (Painting and Performing Arts) at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts and was the finalist of the Exibart Prize. For Casellato, everyday objects become the protagonists and carriers of mystery. The elements within her paintings are dynamic; they bond and attempt to find their new identity within the reality they reside in. They are diverse, tarnished, suspended on the surface of the canvas, waiting for something to happen. There’s a gradual alternation of normality, which becomes increasingly more present, insistent and dominant the longer I spend looking at the Il Prodogio; the feeling I can’t seem to shake off is restlessness, hidden behind the veil of the familiar. Once the veil is eliminated, I am forced to look at what’s in front of me from a different angle - the painting is a manifestation of ardour, and as we all know, ardour is something that sparks out of the blue, and when we least expect it, it passes, fades, vanishes. The painting, however, is so intense that it’s open to endless interpretations and definitions, the shapes that populate its surface are able to continuously convey new ideas and fit into multiple dimensions. All of its elements are interconnected and belong to the everyday, and therefore to us - they are different in their nature and recall contrasting images under different gazes, but they are nonetheless linked, connected by their pictorial qualities, and the meanings that we attach to them. This sincere and inclusive interpretation and representation of the forms thus possesses the capacity to detach itself from whatever certainties, uncertainties and expectations Caterina gives us, allowing the viewer to create their own narrative within her artwork, encouraged by the flexibility of forms that inhabit the canvas. We discard what is familiar. We are free. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 Il prodigio 2021 Oil on canvas 157 x 144 cm

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°15

FROM ITALY

CECCONI MELONI EDVIGE

Edvige attends the IUAV in Venice with a specialization in Visual Arts and Theater. Graduated master’s degree in Visual Cultures and Curatorial Practices at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera. Dedicates the path of the thesis to the epistolary relationship that took place between the poetess Cristina Campo and the writer Alessandro Spina, starting from the 1960s and published in Correspondence. Fortifying the artistic and literary passion for the concept of the letter. Astral and star maps find space and debate with unidentified life forms. It is an overturning of axes and axioms to create an illustrated book during the work phase. “Fin dall’infanzia percepivo lo scorrere delle ore indipendente da ogni riferimento, da ogni atto e da ogni evento, la disgiunzione del tempo da ciò che tempo non era, la sua esistenza autonoma, il suo statuto singolare, il suo impero, la sua tirannia. Ricordo con estrema chiarezza quel pomeriggio in cui, per la prima volta, di fronte all’universo vacante, non ero più che fuga di istanti ribelli ad adempiere ancora la loro particolare funzione. Il tempo si separava dall’essere a mie spese.Questa è una parte su cui rifletto da molto tempo, un estratto di Emil Cioran.” — Text by Pelin Zeytinci

1-2 Astral and star maps 2021 Mixed media on canvas Site-specific installation

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°16

FROM ITALY

CELLINI GIORGIO

Giorgio Cellini, with Florentine origins, was born in Turin, lives in Milan; he will soon move to a seaside location. My research stems from the desire to investigate the identity of being an artist and the status of the work of art. Divine is a subjective, personal and autobiographical investigation that at the same time aims to connect with the questions shared by my generation and by today’s society. For me, artistic creation is a practice of knowledge that is not subordinated to creating a form. The research I have undertaken is a daily, intellectual and manual practice, based on empirical experimentation, without thesis and antithesis. Chance and irony concur, aimed at making every day interesting as a place of personal and collective discovery. Emerging artists’ performance starts from a series of research and actions carried out by me in recent years, within the major Italian art fairs to investigate the amateur and professionalism in the art system of art. Emerging artists movements for REA Fair was born as a meta-reflection on the status of an emerging artist, on the dynamics and performativity necessary to become a successful artist. The performance consists of an extraordinary and extemporaneous crossing of the fair spaces, a drift aimed at developing and proposing new narratives. The performance also aims to involve the artists participating in the fair to compare and exchange their artistic research. — Text by Pelin Zeytinci

1 Emerging artists movements 2021 Performance

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°17

FROM RUSSIA

CHERNAKOVA NATALIYA

Born in Yekaterinburg in 1990, Nataliya Chernakova currently lives and works in Milan. Nataliya’s education is extensive: in 2011, she graduated from the Ural State Academy of Architecture and Arts in Yekaterinburg, Russia, specialising in industrial design; during the years of 2012 and 2013, she moved between Loughborough University (UK) and the Polytechnic Of Milan attending two courses in Product Design and in 2017 she obtained an MA at the Royal College of Art in London. Chernakova’s practice is influenced by design, architecture and fine art. Her interest in diverse materials and contrasting mediums allows her to merge design and fine art and formalise detailed research based on the history of the tools and visual aspects of mechanisms of identity manipulation. Nataliya’s subjects are nostalgic and emotional, influenced by the contemporary perspective and Impressionism and Baroque movements, which fascinate her with their attention to sumptuousness and the more introspective side of the formal aspects. Through sensual and soft shapes achieved with different materials, the artist faces the concept of the female desire that can not escape the current conditions of life. Chernakova aims to reconcile this desire with the reality in which we live using a historically transcendent language through creating marble sculptures, paintings and videos. The series of works Lolita is part of Chernakova’s new body of work that represents the sensual forms of the female body recognised by the artist within the shape of a boat engine. Power and masculinity, usually associated with skill and speed, are overturned and accumulated in colours, sounds and materials that refer to the opposite world. The male, by association, is relieved of his assignment and directs the viewer to an alienated image where forms and ideas merge. The series includes an animation in which this pink hybrid creature spins around itself with the background sound - the song taken from Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film Lolita and a water-carved sculpture made of pink onyx. Nataliya Chernakova has participated in several group exhibitions internationally, including the side-event on the official “Machines of Loving Grace” at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and “Lost Senses” the ‘Common Projects’, supported by the Arts Council of England. In 2019, Chernakova was among the 20 artists selected for the Cairo Prize. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1 Lolita 2019 Video 3’ 13’’ Edition of 9 plus 1 AP

REA ART FAIR! 2021

2-3 Lolita 2020 Water cut pink onyx 38 x 20,7 x 10 cm Edition of 6 plus 1 AP

ARTIST N°18

FROM ITALY

COLÒ ELISABETTA

Elisabetta was born in Milan, where she currently lives. She went to Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera and had many exhibitions in Milan and Germany. Her artistic research is based on the reality she encounters every day, related to the tradition of painting. The work presented depicts the image of a bird found on the internet that had particularly impressed her. She wanted to represent him in the manner of Rudolf Stingel, paying homage to his works and exploring that area of painting closely linked to photography. However, she started from entirely different assumptions from Stingel’s work: trying to detach herself from the apathy and coldness typical of black and white photographs, she wanted to return not only verisimilitude and animation but something else, something intensely expressive. — Text by Pelin Zeytinci

1 Aquila Arpia 2020 Acrylic on canvas 100 x100 cm

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°19

FROM ROMANIA

COLTEANU MATEI VLADIMIR

Colțeanu Matei Vladimir (1997, Romania) is currently working in Milan, his drawing deals with the conflict between historical accuracy and conspiracy theories backed by a postmodern perspective. In 2018 he participates in a series of exhibitions INCONTRI #, at Fondazione Adolfo Pini in Milan, under the supervision of Adrian Paci and Gianni Caravaggio. Colțeanu Matei Vladimir chooses to integrate in his works elements that come from stories of classical structure or daily encounters. Through narration he initiates a process of self-awareness translated into suggestive images. He avoids overcomplicating the artistic language and he is opposed to the inflation of concepts, the artist stands for a more direct, meaningful interaction between the creator, the spectator and the work itself. This simplicity of course doesn’t exclude profound meaning or desires within the artwork, but it is an attempt to demonstrate how the contemporary art scene can benefit from straightforwardness. Animal-like, grotesque figures attacking and devouring one another, aim to deconstruct systems of oppression of our society, condemning toxic masculinity, violence, corruption and abuse of power.

1 Atomic Laika at Kármán line 2020 Colored pencils on paper 50 x 35 cm 1

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°20

FROM ITALY

CONFORTI LORENZO

Lorenzo Conforti (b. 1996) was born in San Severino Marche. He holds a bachelor degree in Decoration Arts from the Urbino Academy. In 2019 he founded together with Andrea Luzi and Vittorio Zeppillo an installation writing project called Hardchitepture. He took part in a show entitled “Nei sogni cominciano le responsabilità” curated by Alberto Zanchetta at Galleria Adele Cappelli, Accademy of Fine Arts Urbino (2021); “Surprize II”, curated by Umberto Palestini at the Centro Arti visive La Pescheria Di Pesaro (2020) and “30 x 30 - a collective exhibition” curated by the artistic collective Vidakrei in collaboration with the Talesofart gallery at the Spazio Vidakrei di Ferrara (2019). Lorenzo Conforti has an unconventional approach to pictorial gestures. While studying at the Urbino Academy, he began to divide his research, probing new techniques that led him to experiment with painting on canvas technique in addition to the wall painting. For Lorenzo, the wall always remains a more accessible and disinterested opportunity to experience the form and the writing. At the same time, the sacredness of the canvas allows him to study and deepen more intimate and emotional aspects. Despite this division of practices, the two often meet and influence each other. The canvas is contaminated by spray paint, a typical medium of the street World, and Lorenzo leaves quick and decisive marks stylistically attributable to signing. Conforti dedicated part of his studies to calligraphy that made him understand how writing is not only a sign but a form composed of rhythmic emptiness and fullness. Conforti’s most recent paintings distance themselves from earlier experimentation. The painting presented at the Fair is the breakthrough painting of his pattern, not so much stylistically but rather conceptually. Autochimerico is a reflective starting point on the concept that originates from the artist himself and aims to review the idea of a dynamic character. The notion of chimaera interests the artist concerning the possibilities of choice: the interiorization of their life choices and the result that comes from those. So we’re looking at an identity chimaera, as the artist’s identity is composed of various parts, and therefore he is a kind of modern-day chimaera concerning the time he exists in. The artist chooses and forms the image precisely as he illustrates a path of choices made alongside the mistakes and external obstacles. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1 Autochimerico 2021 Oil paint, oil bar and spray paint on canvas 72 x 52 cm 1

CATALOGUE

REA ART FAIR! 2021

Now in its second year, ReA! is attempting to showcase the “harmony” which can be created when cultural limitations are removed.

1/5

ARTIST N°21

FROM ITALY

CONTI STEFANO

Stefano Conti (b.1994, Italy) is an artist living and working in Göteborg, Sweden. He holds an MFA in Photography from Valand Academy, Göteborg, and a BFA in Photography from LABA, Brescia, Italy. His works have been exhibited internationally, and recent exhibitions took place at Tête Gallery (Berlin, 2021), Condominio (Milan, 2021), Faux Pas (Göteborg, 2021), Landskrona Foto Festival (Landskrona, Sweden, 2020) and Premio Nocivelli (Verolanuova, Italy, 2020). Furthermore, in 2021 he won the Dummy PhotoBook Prize from Palazzo Rasponi (Ravenna, Italy). Through a cross-disciplinary approach that intertwines photography, sculpture, and video, his practice explores the limits of photographic space and questions the perception of things: he re-arranges objects with printed matter to investigate what we perceive as a photograph, reflecting upon the fragmentation of the contemporary digital sphere. In the last years, Conti projects took the shape of artist books and installations in which he juxtaposed photographic prints to objects and materials, expanding them from the walls to the floor. Stemming from historical issues linked to archaeology, museums, and history writing, in his practice, the artist uses photography to stir these issues towards the contemporary time: “I believe that a museum must not be the setting for an accumulation of isolated art objects, but the space in which our relationships with them and reality can be reconfigured. The methods that archaeologists use to fill in information gaps and to reconstruct the past fascinate me. In my works, I want to re-establish this confusion of information on a visual level, combining materials from the past to materials from the present to observe what may emerge”. In He Found An Old Blue Ocean: Fossil n.25, by intertwining his photographs of fossils with found video footage from YouTube, the artist created a narrative that revolves around the orogenesis process which formed the Alps. In a critique of the history writing, he developed replicas of fossils that were eventually photographed and juxtaposed to archival materials seeking to build new narratives that could question or confirm historical facts belonging to our collective past and memory. By employing this small window on alpine history as a starting point, Conti investigates the relationship amongst images, the notion of truth, and how they can be used to create evidence of facts. He says: “Grounded in epistemological theories; I question the contemporary problems of image dematerialization in the ether and how societies trust the knowledge that these images convey”. — Stefano Conti

1 He Found An Old Blu Ocean: Fossil n.25 2020 Archival pigment print on semi-gloss paper, dibond 60 x 43 cm

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°22

FROM ITALY

CURATELA PLACEBO

Curatela Placebo was born in Venice in February 2021, the paths of Margherita Falqui, Silvia Marchese and Marina Marques meet. Margherita Falqui (1996, Sardinia), studied art history and visual arts in Venice and is interested in video art, sound narration, writing and curating. Silvia Marchese (1993, Teramo), comes from a background of product design and art publishing. She then went on to study botany and visual arts. Marina Marques (1998, Natal), has a transdisciplinary background that includes editorial curatorship, photography, visual and non visual arts. They research and realise curative/curatorial projects that are developed in order to narrate and communicate the olfactory perception and the experience of its loss in the contemporary world. In the constant deodorisation and digitalisation, it made sense to treat the loss of smell, as a pathology but also as lack of contact, during this moment in time, an urgency that is impossible to escape. It’s not medicine, it is placebo: it is an empathetic rescue kit, a sensibility stimulus , means to evoke recovery of the sensory contact. A kit for an emergency of physical, sensory and emotional isolation. This is an alternative remedy to the drip of images and virtuality to which we are attached to, to the contemporary relational and perceptive annihilation. Having collected the testimonies of individuals suffering from olfactory pathologies such as anosmia, parosmia and phantosmia, as well as testimonies of artists and researchers whose work revolves around the fifth sense; the curators of Curatela Placebo are composing How to make sense without you, a printed publication. The publication includes Scentytizer, a sanitizingsensitizing gel, and Under Your Smell, one or more personal care products that accompany the readings. The whole composes the kit of empathetic relief (You Keep Me) Under No Smell: a reading, meditation and sensory experience that can help us “make sense”, think and stimulate the body, relate, perceive, feel, sense. — Curatela Placebo

1 You Keep Me Under No Smell 2021 Ongoing project

REA ART FAIR! 2021

The publication How to make sense without you collects the contributions of: Enrico Boccioletti, Francesco Fazzi, IOKOI, Mariko Hori, Raffaella Naldi Rossano, Maria Electra Pacini, Nuvola Ravera, Margherita Soldati, Marco Sgarbossa, Michele Tiberio & Diletta Tonatto, Yoann Van Parys, Stefania Zanetti & Matteo Bellomo; Matteo Dal Zovo, Andrea Gallozzi, Raul Sabbadini, Lisa Ventura. Consulting and substance creation: Emma Lecchini, Luca Veresani. Graphic Consulting: Giuseppe Defilippis, Eleonora Falqui. Design consultancy and thermoforming: Pier Luca Freschi, FlowEasyThermoForming.

ARTIST N°23

FROM HUNGARY

CZIKA KRISZTINA

The Hungarian artist Krisztina Czika lives and works in Amsterdam. She first studied at the Fashion and Trade School of Crafts, Clothing and Textiles, in Budapest and then completed her education at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, in Amsterdam. Among the latest exhibitions she has participated in we find “Between Lockdowns”, BIG ART 2020 in Zaandam,“Absurd Beings on Skin” group show in Amsterdam and “The Space Makers” at Galerie Pouloeuff in Naarden. The artist has always been attracted to the material world and to its possibilities of expression. Back as a student in Budapest and later on in the Netherlands, she instinctively approached the theme, fascinated by the different components that can constitute an object. In her work Krisztina experiments with various types of physical materials, focusing not only on their palpable characteristics, but also on the stories and emotions they carry, paying attention to the physical and the metaphysical. Divergence, which is exhibited in the three installations shown at the fair, is a photography-based project that is divided into three different series: Reflection, Refraction, Distortion. Born from a generalized and indefinite collective state of existence in times of a global crisis, the artist felt the need to open a way to reflect on the current state of interlude. In this series the photographs transformed into sculptures that are the fruit of a reflective reach, of a global introspection that has become a consequence of a prolonged and truly forced period of liberation from all physical restrictions. The images - preserved and printed on broken glass and mounted on wood - are each born from the artist’s desire to break free. Fruit of an insistent desire to live a life of emotional indulgence and unrestricted creativity. Each image is the physical manifestation of a longed for escape that has been fueled during months of isolation and confined movement. The Refraction series starts from the concept of refraction that bends light until substances are reduced to transparency. Just as the beams of light strike through the body of water and consequently create their own abstractions, the artist wants to soften our hardness, leaving the viewer to float calmly in the free forms and free movements of the image. Czika tries to freeze a vibrant mood on a reused glass fragment to give us a set of collective memories. Seizing a moment of refracted luminescent light during the times of the global crisis. Through her captured and immortalized images full of light and transparency Czika tries to touch upon the collective 1 turbulence and the figurative acts of adaptation.

1-2-3 Refraction serie 2021 Mixed media Variable dimensions

REA ART FAIR! 2021

Czika tries to freeze a vibrant mood on a reused glass fragment to give us a set of collective memories. Seizing a moment of refracted luminescent light during the times of the global crisis. Through her captured and immortalized images full of light and transparency Czika tries to touch upon the collective turbulence and the figurative acts of adaptation.

ARTIST N°24

DAVIDE SARA

FROM ITALY

Sara Davide (1994, Milan) lives and works in Milan, where she graduated cum laude in Visual Arts, focusing on sculpture, at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. She obtained a Masters in Photography at the CFP Bauer, Milan. Currently attending the two-year specialist course of New Technologies of Art, specialising in photography, at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. She has participated in the TRACCIATI residency (2021) and her work autoritratto (2020) selected by the COMBAT Prize jury and included in the official 2021 catalogue. She is particularly attentive towards the photographic medium in relation to materials, in a continuous game of integration and absorption of photography by materiality and of materiality by photography. “Sara Davide’s research revolves around the representation of the threedimensional object, of the sculptural through photography and an investigation of the subject being captured through the camera lens, as an entity exerting dominance over the photographic medium. The artist observes recurrent patterns while documenting natural and industrial surfaces as the two key practices through which she carries forward her investigation meet.” — Paola Shiamtani autoritratto (self-portrait) is a series of shots representing skin fragments of the author herself. This work tries to reflect on our contemporary time, on the concepts of portraiture and the face as tools for structuring individual identities. The realistic sculptures, made out of silicon and realised with a direct casting technique, give shape to a skin which is then captured as a still life subject. The face in its totality is parcelled out, details gain importance and ambiguity takes over clarity. Photography remediates the sculptures that cannot be assayed by the viewer: the perception of the image superimposes itself on the subject, creating sheer illusion. Humans need to keep faces alive since ancient times, through funeral masks or effigies. The masks make way for photography, as it also operates by imprinting reality on a surface. What does the face represent nowadays? In autoritratto the present remediates the past, while the constant link between media - here mimetically employed - unearths the plurality of the self.

1 autoritratto 2020 Photographs Glicée print, mounted on aluminium (framed) 50 x 75 cm

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°25

FROM ITALY

DEL FABRO CAMILLA

Born in Bologna (1993), Camilla Del Fabro moved to Ghent in 2016, where she currently lives and works. Since she was a child, she has cultivated a dispassionate interest in drawing, which she experiences and inserts into her life as spontaneously and often as possible. She spends hours making pen drawings, playing with restaurant’s signs, vitrines and the remains of food, or capturing scenes or expressions of passers-by at the bus stop. In 2012 she enrolled at the IUAV in Venice to organise and expand her research. She met Liliana Moro and Agnes Kohlmeyer, which allowed her to get out of the two-dimensional plane of the drawing medium, but it is with the transfer to Ghent and with the introduction to the KASK School of Art, where she’s currently undergoing a course in Film and Animation, that she finalises her love for drawing and sketching. Del Fabro’s interest lies first of all in the inanimate object outside of its close relationship with the animate being. The idea of bringing everyday objects to life is the engine that drives the artist to experiment with animation techniques such as stop motion. A Chair Porn comes from the most extensive research entitled “My chair asked me to do an exhibition”, which saw the assembly of many visual elements in which the story of the chairs engaging in monologues and existential dialogues is told through photographs portraying them participating in various kinds of activities such as going to the parks and the museums. Made with the stop motion technique, A Chair Porn shows an actual 90s porn curtain with bright and sensual colours, in which we recognise elements belonging to the private life of the two chairs. Sexual desire and pleasure are the most human activities that the artist can associate with the object to make it humanly independent and give it a physical and carnal body with drives and passions associable with the human being. Although the artist has tried to remove human sexuality as much as possible - no sexual organ is evident, and no anthropomorphic characteristics are recognisable - the experience of sexual intercourse has been projected onto the two chairs. The irony is another prominent element that makes the work more accessible. Humour is a constant in Del Fabro’s works and always aims to change the common knowledge regarding the objects and, at the same time, Disturb and amuse the audience. The film was selected and screened at the Austrian festival “Home is where art is”, and the Fanzine Illustrated Chairs Manners Book was presented and sold at the Fanzines Happenings IV - V - VI in Kunsthal of Gent. In addition, Del Fabro has collaborated with several private and public structures for the realisation of animated videos and fanzines. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1 A Chair Porn 2018 Claymation 1728 x 1728 px + A Chair Porn 2018 4’ 23’’

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°26

FROM ITALY

DELIGIO ELEONORA

Eleonora Deligio (1998, Puglia) is currently working between Bari and Milan. She works with video using analog and digital mediums, investigating her own origins, collective and personal memory, shared primordial needs and rehabilitation. Eleonora Deligio’s video entitled Amacangia is inspired by the monumental landscape of Calanchi, in south-eastern Lucania, rough terrain and arid white dunes devoid of vegetation become a symbol of the artist’s origin. The territory in this area is rich in white clay and sand, its geomorphological conformation means that the nature of the soil is not as solid or as rocky as one might imagine, on the contrary, the soil soft, it breaks and crumbles between one’s fingers when touched. Leaving and returning, whirling in the air, getting lost and settling momentarily like dust, then settling a little and starting again to repeat the same journey, its destination; distance, in a trajectory that is always new, accompanied by a new gaze, nurtured by distance. Due corpi, un setaccio, due voci. Il gesto ritorna. La voce, la parola, la bocca è uno strumento. Il luogo delle radici dà il tempo ai corpi. L’ incontro con una parte remota e volontariamente cancellata. Una litania scritta come un flusso di coscienza, un invito alla riflessione sul cambiamento, uno tra tutti, il ritorno nella mia terra. La riscoperta. Il ritorno. — Eleonora Deligio

1-2-3 Amacangia 2021 Video, HD, b/n, sound 4’ 15”

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°27

FROM ITALY

DI FERDINANDO NICCOLÒ

REA ART FAIR! 2021

Niccolò Di Ferdinando (b. 1999) is an Italian artist currently based in Rome. He obtained a BA in Fine Art (Painting) from ISA Roma2 and is currently studying for an MA in Fine Art at RUFA. In 2019 he created his artistic project entitled ANTIFIGURE, where he gathers his artworks that range from painting to video, installations and audio art. As Di Ferdinando puts it - I have to disobey my projects to create something that I can enjoy; I think of my approach as scientific when creating a new piece - as the shapes begin to occur on the working surface, I am inclined to dismantle everything and start again, it’s a continuous process of adding and taking away. Niccolo works with the limits, as he believes that the most exciting situations occur between total control and the loss of it; his research, therefore, is rooted in error and in the existential question of how much control exists within any action. IPERCOSTRUZIONE is the definition of gestural; it’s dynamic, aggressive and unforgiving. The surface of the pictorial plane is scattered with bold, varied marks applied with different tools: foam rollers that simultaneously make the work transparent in some parts and matte, impenetrable in others; palette knife which creates a light impasto effect, supported by the intense hue of crimson red; and finally the light, elegant straight lines of ink that delicately hold the rest of the monumental shapes in place. Abstract painting is filled with possibilities for interpretation; that’s one of the aspects that makes it so astonishing; the viewer decides what to see and how to interpret what’s in front of him. The artist has beautifully captured simultaneous lack and presence of control, glorifying the unexpected, the chance and the surprising that goes hand in hand with the most flexible and exciting mediums - oil paint. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 IPERCOSTRUZIONE 2020 Oil and ink on paper 50 x 62,5 cm

ARTIST N°28

FROM ITALY

DI MASSIMO ALESSANDRO

Alessandro Di Massimo (Italy) is artist who lives and works in Edinburgh. He has lived and worked in Rome for a long time and during his studies of Set Design of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, he quickly starts moving in the lively underground scene of the capital. Street art, fanzines, political restlessness and the extraordinary beauty of the Eternal city had a great influence on his artistic formation. After graduation, he spent some periods studying and working in various European cities and then settled in Edinburgh in 2013. Recent exhibitions include; Premio Cramum at Villa Bagatti Valsedo, Varedo; The Rise and Fall of Your Chosen Empire at Ltd Ink Corporation, Edinburgh (solo), Acies at The Number Shop, Edinburgh (solo), Refraction at 24hourswindow (part of Glasgow International, solo show), Whole World Working (W.W.W.) at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. The following text refers specifically to one of the works in the Terrain series. In each of the of the 4 works; Reciting Italy’s National Anthem While Standing On My Head, Trying To Hold Britain Together While Singing “Sympathy For The Devil”, Sixteen Push-ups On Russian Soil and Vaticano, clay originating from the country depicted on the map sculpture was used. The work Reciting Italy’s National Anthem While Standing On My Head, which is based on the concept of territory, imagines new ways of manifesting our personal and collective identity in relation to the contemporary context. It involves an improper element - the body - in the traditional geographic semantics of the map; pushing this tool beyond its descriptive function. The map by its nature establishes boundaries, in this case it is used to reconsider them: Are our bodies affected by our boundaries or are our boundaries affected by our bodies? The installation, realised using ceramics, performance, consists of a scale map of the peninsula made out of clay - from an Italian quarry - and a video. During the realisation of the video, the map of fresh clay, comes into contact with the body that imprints its mark on it; the baking will take place afterwards.

1 Reciting Italy’s national anthem while standing on my head 2020 Ceramic (made with clay produced in Italy), L shaped hooks, video portrait format 16:9.

REA ART FAIR! 2021

ARTIST N°29

FROM ITALY

DONAGGIO GIANMARCO

Gianmarco Donaggio, born in Italy, is director of photography, direction, artistic research and image philosophy. He graduated from the art high school of Varese in 2010 and graduated from Bournemouth, England, in 2014 as a cinematographer and director of experimental documentaries. Between 2015 and 2020, he mainly lived in Oslo, travelling regularly in Europe and worldwide to collaborate with important cinema contemporary figures. A careful observer of the role of image in society and interested in the evolution of the cinematographic form, he continues his research at the University of Lund in Sweden, specialising in visual cultures. His art is in the balance between an interest in the formal component of cinema and one tendency to conceptualise a cinema intended as a poetic atmosphere. Since 2018, his films have taken part in various international film festivals and art exhibitions. “Manifestarsi” (2021), presented in a world premiere at the 57th International Exhibition of new cinema in Pesaro, is his debut as an author in the panorama of Italian cinema. The film was born from the microscopic investigation of the material component of posters advertisements posted in Milan. The author, through a unique perspective, goes beyond the limits of vision by inviting us to fall in the alienating and enveloping physical structure beyond the mythical surface of the images. The the cinematic result is an atmosphere that is not abstract but relatively informal, where the matter reflects a visual condition devoid of perspective references on which to base metaphysical foundations: here, the process suspends the essence. “Manifestarsi” (2021) is part of a series of experiments beginning in 2020, including “Milano di carta” (2020) and “Aria di Attesa” (2021). A hypothetical “material cinema”, one methodology influenced by the current of new materialism and informal art, experiments with a procedural cinematographic form, where artistic investigation, questioning the subject through meticulous technical care, produces deeply atmospheric audio-visual results. — Text by Pelin Zeytinci

1-2 Manifestarsi 12’ Short film

REA ART FAIR! 2021

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ARTIST N°30

FROM UNITED KINGDOM

DOUGLAS FERGUSON FREYA

Born in Oxford, Freya Douglas Ferguson lives and works in London. Driven to undertake an interdisciplinary path, she studied Glassblowing at Urban Glass in New York in 2018, Sculpture at the City and Guilds of London Art School, and then graduated in 2020 with a BA in Fine Art from the Goldsmiths University in London. She exhibited in various art spaces in London during her studies, including the 5th Base Gallery, Anish Kapoor’s Studio, and Central Saint Martin’s. She was recently selected as an emerging artist by the New Contemporaries project (UK). The artist has always used a wide range of technical skills with which she undertakes creative practices that are all seemingly interconnected. Metalworking - both forging and casting, is one of Freya’s predominant techniques, along with glass medium. Freya spent much of her time as a student in the bronze foundry, casting her sculptures, and, more recently, she took up a part-time job at a blacksmith workshop. For her, artisanal and traditional practices are perfectly combined with contemporary aesthetics. Guided by the possible combinations and the inevitable tensions born from the process, she creates a dialogue between old and new aesthetics. Working with a wide variety of mediums and materials, the artist aims to combine historical craftsmanship techniques with contemporary ready-made, hightech manufacturing components, technological scraps and disposable products of today’s technology. Douglas questions the hierarchies present in contemporary art and visual culture through the manipulation of materials. Presented as an artefact, Relic (Momentary Souvenir) appears aesthetically retrofuturistic. In other words, one of the most standard elements linked to the contemporary is placed in conjunction with the ambiguous armoured hand that ignites a sense of temporal tension in the viewer. The selfie stick does not confirm the medieval aesthetic of the hand that holds it between its fingers and appears to have come from some other era as it resembles something that came from space. The hybrid image that has been created appears as a futuristic cyborg that wants to explore the blurred lines between digital technologies and the organic body. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1 Relic (Momentary Souvenir) 2021 Cast pewter, selfie stick, iPhone, butterflies H65 x W45 x D17 cm

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ARTIST N°31

FROM BELGIUM

DUFOOR ARTHUR

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Arthur Dufoor (b. 1997) is a Belgian artist based in Brussels. He has been developing his skills in classical oil painting for the past ten years; starting with the figurative approach, his work slowly evolved into the field of abstract painting. The fluidity and aggressiveness of intensely coloured shapes and patterns are central to his painterly approach; nevertheless, his appreciation and fascination for the Old Masters always shines through. In 2020 Dufoor obtained an MA in Fine Art at the Luca School of Arts in Ghent and had since shown his work in numerous spaces, including the ‘Witte Rook’ (Breda), the ‘Kunsthal’ (Ghent) and ‘LaVallée’ in Brussels. After completing his studies in Ghent, Arthur got his own art studio in a small coastal town of Westende, where he continued to paint for six months before moving back to Brussels. My work departs from a radical intuitive and therapeutic approach, communicating raw emotions and expressive sensibility through large scale oil paintings. Drawing from diverse influences such as Mannerism, Baroque and PostModernist painters, Dufoor’s work always balances between the confessional and the brutal. His paintings constitute an abstract language but always remain close to reality in a quest for the perfect artwork. Functioning as a large-scale diary, Dufoor’s work often integrates various notes and quotes from his daily life. Untitled (Breda) is a perfect example of the contrast that the artist so skillfully creates: emotions relating to delicacy and susceptibility rise within me as I look at the thin, elegant black lines that are first and foremost recognised as marks, and only then turn into words. In doing so, the tension between personal vulnerability and the ruthlessness of the abstract language becomes apparent. At the same time, I recognise the brutality of gestural marks in ruby red that inhibit the surface of the canvas. This opposition created by such diverse mark-making is apparent, yet they aren’t in conflict; on the contrary, they are engaged in an intense, passionate dialogue, overlapping and retreating within the pictorial plane of the canvas. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 Untitled (Breda) 2021 Oil on canvas 200 x 180 cm

ARTIST N°32

FROM SLOVENIA

DVORSCAK PATRIK

Patrik Dvorščak was born in march of 1995, and he comes from Ribnica, Slovenia. He has studied design and photography in Ljubljana. He has continued his education in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design. His creation deals with content referring to today’s man in society and numerous crowds formations, which indicate the desolate, shallow realities of everyday life and resist the ideas of a defined, enlightened world and moral beliefs. Together with a group of elements or figures in the artistic creation, I set the viewer in the position of the creator of everything around us – the people we are, in the course of our stay, responsible for their own and the lives of all the others. I am trying to put the participant to look at something reliable. I see population growth as the most significant problem which intersects with other global issues – more people, more deforestation, more toxins, water scarcity … This makes me wonder whether the collapses of civilizations are indirectly intentional. No matter the pattern we play as a culture, a form of self-destruction is always present. The essence of humanity is not innate, but the fact remains that this is how humans imagine it. Due to a certain measure of naivety and egocentrism, they believe that they are, as spiritual and conscious beings, captured in a single historical and geographical way of existence. The individual’s need to recognize fact is their biological as well as psychological necessity. After being born, a baby will already respond primarily to feelings of pleasure brought about by a full stomach. In its nature, it gives an unscrupulous priority to satisfaction, experiencing itself as the centre of the universe. Later on, when we grow up, the child inside us merges with external influences and is brought into the unconscious. The unconscious, the deepest layers of our soul, made of instinctive drives, do not know the harmful content of their death. Observing what present “civilized” peoples are responsible for, the injustice and cruelty worldwide, it seems that we behave as though we were immortal. In a world of screens, illusions and consumerism conditioning the unreality of death, the sense that nothing can befall our almighty civilization is perhaps even further intensified. — Text by Pelin Zeytinci

1 Hold Together Things 2021

ARTIST N°33

FROM ITALY

ESPOSITO MANUEL

Manuel Esposito was born in ‘99, was born in Monza. Until early adolescence he lives in a manner totally disinterested in the culture, which he will encounter in the last years of artistic high school. Work with video, photography and performance. In 2020 he founded the Avocado Rosso exhibition research project. He currently lives and works in Brianza and is attending the third year of New Art Technologies at the Brera Academy. A nature mediated by the inorganic eye of the room places the optical unconscious at the center as a practice and as an attitude of fruition. The eye of the visual machine produces images and imaginaries of the organic world, not visible except through the aid of technical tools. Hence the research on the optical unconscious as a specific filmic. Awareness of the relationship between the visual machine and the subject produces a conscious image of its mediation and therefore deeply respectful of the subject itself. The visual machine’s eye makes images and imaginary of organic life that are visible only by using technical instrument. From this point, I started my research on the optical unconscious as a specific cinematic. The film borns from an interest in architecture endangered. My gaze observes the nature inhabiting the space.

L’occhio, mi si è, adagiato” Two channels HD video - sound

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ARTIST N°34

FROM ITALY

EYEROD ART COLLECTIVE

EYEROD is an artist collective formed by the two performers Davide Amato (Italy, b. 1993) and Polly Wilson (England, b. 1993), the visual artist Lauren Raaijmakers (Holland, b. 1996) and the sound designers Raphael Schuler (Germany, b. 1995) and Christian Baas (Holland, b. 1995). They met in Rotterdam, where they are currently based and carried out research on performance that started from investigating the state of uncertainty concerning the world we live in. The name of the collective consists of two words: EYE - a part of the body that gives and receives images and symbolises our need to see and be seen; and ROD - which is a cell present in the visual apparatus that allows one to have sight sensitivity even in a dark space. Their first performance - The Glitch comes from a research process that has given the duo the space to play with the postmodern conditions they are experiencing. Initially conceived as a single act, it then takes on a more complex shape over time until it is manifested as a living and constantly evolving work in its own right. The themes brought to the stage by The Glitch are continuously transformed and exchanged with the visions of EYEROD, creating an interconnected and codependent relationship between the two. The performance functions as a narrative framework in which artists can consult their perception of the cosmos, spiritually and abstractly, materially and technologically. The early performances of The Glitch focused on the paradox of freedom to emphasise the conditions of choice and sacrifice. A ritual, a rite of passage in which the participants and guests were involved in the act and invited to get lost in a narrative and mythological space made of sounds and dances on the verge of primitivism. The Glitch started as an interactive theatre piece and has been adapted and updated to diverse contexts. For this occasion, the collective brings a renewed version of this project within a different philosophical lens; the duo aims to review the symbolic meaning contained in the concept of ritual along with the theory of Jean Baudrillard and the simulacrum - the notion of rituals and empty objects, the link between consumerism and mythology. The same symbols brought to the stage by the past performances are simulacra, which means that they are no longer rooted in a “profound truth” but in infinite copies of themselves. The objects seem familiar, but the whole composition is perceived as absurd, aided by immersion in a constant background sound, a collage of disturbing and incoherent noises; accompanied by random images and videos projected into the scene. For the performance duration, the sounds and images are to be played live by DJs and VJs. Their role is to create the illusion of myth in all of its power, which collides with the useless simulacra that the performers are trying to utilise. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1 The glitch in the shrine 2021 Performative installation

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ARTIST N°35

FROM ITALY

FASOLI ILARIA

Ilaria Fasoli was born in Mirano in 1992. In 2011 she enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia’s Painting course in the Atelier of Prof. Carlo Di Raco, becoming acquainted with young emerging artists such as Nebojsa Despotovic and Thomas Braida. After the immersive painting experience, Fasoli enrolled at the IUAV University of Venice to experiment with different mediums and languages of art alongside professors such as Alberto Garutti, Angela Vettese, Renè Gabri and Antoni Muntadas. Painting remains Ilaria’s primary medium, although she’s simultaneously interested in others. The artist defines painting as an introspective language that allows her to depict emotional images that suggest and allude to the intimate female world. Her paintings are seductive, and the primary rule of seduction is to never reveal anything fully to the audience; the artworks capture the details but at the same time do not display everything. The main protagonists of the canvases are bodies draped in silk and shiny satin, and we can’t be sure who those bodies belong to. Through her works, Ilaria explores the concepts of seduction, romantic love and stereotypical sensuality.The painting entitled Bordeaux is an immersion in classical painting manifested throughout the body of works. It touches on the aesthetics of Classical and Baroque art, residing between the contemporary, the reality, the myth, the clarity and the allusion - it is a pictorial reflection on the romantic nature of humans who, through the countless legends that spoke of lovers and heroes, sailing the seas of passion, driven by waves of desire, project romantic fairy tales onto their love experiences. In modern Western culture, romantic love is considered the only way to live a romantic relationship and the artist, through an effortless gesture, asks us to put at the centre of the discussion a cliché, a collective stereotype like that of the romantic imagination to recalculate everyone’s expectations. It asks us the question about the senses, the motives and the meaning of the images themselves that constitute seduction, desire and love descending into the depths of such stories to give us a version too bright to be true. The artist has exhibited in Italy on different occasions, such as the Parma Film Festival (2019), the combat Prize (2017), ARTES Di ArtVerona (2015) and the collective Young Artists of the Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa in 2017 and 2018. She currently lives and works in Venice. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1 Bordeaux 2021 Oil on canvas 50 x 70cm

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ARTIST N°36

FROM UCKRAINE

FEDOROVA VITALIIA

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Vitaliia Fedorova is a Ukranian artist who works and lives in Milan. Fedorova is passionate about contemporary art and the film industry. In 2017 she graduated from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology. And, after moving to Milan, she began her art path by showing her installation entitled Culto Bianco during the # 20 // Erase to Mark exhibition at the Fondazione Pini in Milan in 2019. Vitaliia completed her art education in 2021, graduating with a BA in Fine Art (Painting and Visual Arts); during her studies, her creative research was based on exploring codes and patterns of her native culture, primarily through the mediums of installation and video. During the same year, she took part in the Second Wave programme on the COVIDEO19 platform during the second week with her video Two Person Scene. My current focus is on auteur cinema, through which I continue my research on the poetic and the social, and I am now studying film and sound editing and the intricacies of this process’s organisation to improve my professional qualifications. In her research, the artist distinguishes two primary trends: she is focused on studying the cultural attributes of Eastern European countries, and, having a psychological background, she inevitably performs an analysis based on introspection. Symbology, language constructions, spirituality, memory, phenomena of the psyche and the unconscious are the essential elements of Fedorova’s works. By considering historical and psychological data, she acts as a bearer ofw a certain mentality and culture, simultaneously existing in a multicultural and globalised environment. Vitaliia always aims to share a part of herself with the audience through her works so that her personal experiences are familiar and her everyday adventures unique. The film’s title refers to the Mavka - a type of female spirit in Ukrainian mythology, a creature of the forest. Referencing Slavic rituals, the film investigates the mother-daughter relationship - or rather daughter-daughter relationships, since we always remain someone’s child even after growing up - throughout three generations of the artist’s family, that has historically existed without the father figures, and consequently didn’t correspond to the model of the ideal family firmly imprinted in our thought patterns by the society that we live in. Having been shot in Ukraine, the work makes evident the historically developed traces of language deterritorialisation. For me, MAVKAS is a short film rather than simply a video piece; it touched me so profoundly with its honesty, melancholy and nostalgia that it brought me to tears. In merely 21 minutes and 43 seconds, Vitaliia connects and elaborates on the concept of family, on relationships within it, the importance and significance of rituals to keep the culture alive, on languages as a reflection of history and ultimately on love. Vitaliia Fedorova is the one to watch. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 MAVKAS 2021 Video 21’ 43’’

ARTIST N°37

FIKOS

FROM GREECE

Fikos (1987, Athens) was first captivated by Byzantine Art at the young age of 10, when he began embroidering and drawing christian saints in coloured pencils. Active ever since the year 2000 in the street art scene as well, he combines both iconography and graffiti and creates “Contemporary Byzantine Painting”. During that time he is a student of Byzantine painting, his teacher the Greek master painter and iconographer Giorgos Kordis. Fikos becomes a muralist, having painted large-scale murals across the world, the most famous one being 46 meters high Earth and Sky in Kiev, Ukraine. The mural is the largest in the history of Byzantine Painting and the highest artwork in the history of Greek art since ancient years. “I’ve studied Byzantine painting since I was 13 years old in Athens, and I studied the art of the street in the streets”. Fikos describes himself as a “neo-muralist” and also realises paintings on paper and canvas, revising art history, reconciling past and future in the present time. The artist has a vision for ancient painting to live anew, for tradition and mythology to be brought into the present-day art scene through immersion in a contemporary pictorial language. This personal, expressive language naturally derives from the artist’s longing for the folklore fables, Greek myths and Byzantine icons to continue to be vividly present in every-day life. The audience is invited to consider the relevance of the ancient art forms in a contemporary context, to question whether modern-day society has maintained connection or is no longer in contact with visual representations and celebrations of tales and myths from the past.

1 Fikos, Earth and Sky, Kiev, Ukraine Painted for Mural Social Club Curated by Oleg Sosnov and Sky Art Foundation

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ARTIST N°38

FROM ITALY

FIORAMONTI SOFIA

Sofia Fioramonti (b. Rome, 1997) took photographs since she was a child; at the age of 15, she was given her first camera and from there began her obsessive experimentation with photography. In 2016 she enrolled at the Faculty of Architecture at La Sapienza University in Rome, and in 2021 she obtained her MA. However, it was studying in different European capitals that allowed her to travel across the medium, exploring genres such as portrait and street photography, finally circumscribing her experimentation of intimate documentary photography.The artist does not want to define herself as a photographer, despite being fond of the photographic medium for many years. Sofia investigates and expresses herself through the images, photographic or otherwise, of her daily and intimate life composed of travels, people and landscapes that belong to her experience as a young woman. Her images have been created with the naturalness of those who want to frame and give order to their experience: things and people. The artist’s practice arises from the need to analyze herself and what happens around her. The photographic series Silenzio is an ongoing project that evolves with the artist and her desire to pay attention to the details: the places and the people around her - by speaking directly to her viewer, with extreme sincerity and intimacy. Currently, the artist is working with different mediums such as video, continuously going through an utterly personal investigation that confirms that Fioramonti prefers the intimate image over the medium that composes it. She is currently working on her second solo show at the International Women’s House in Rome. She has exhibited in various art spaces such as the Rashomon Club and the Rome and Holy Art Gallery in London. — Text by Milena Zanetti

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Blue Boy, Giugno 2020 Montpellier, Francia Print on matte paper 18 x 27 cm

First Day of Summer, Luglio 2020 Tilburg, Paesi Bassi Print on matte paper 18 x 27 cm

Last Day of Summer, Maggio 2019 Faro, Portogallo Print on matte paper 18 x 27 cm

ARTIST N°39

FROM GERMANY

FISCHER JORINDE

Jorinde Fisher was born in 1990 in Schwäbisch Hall and currently lives and works in Berlin. After obtaining a diploma in Visual Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, she entered the studio of the German artist Jhon Bock with whom, after a year, she obtained a First Level Master’s degree. Numerous exhibitions have been held since 2015, including the one held in Berlin in 2020 at the Berlin Masters Foundation, the Berlin Reset, the birds & Richard Gallery and finally at the Enter Art Fair in Copenhagen in 2021. Interested in the study of figures and proportions, the artist works mainly with fabrics and steel that she modifies and folds, experimenting with a harmonious play between colours and shapes. Fabrics, elastic bands and industrial products are the starting point of her artistic practice - all highly dynamic elements, shaping and bending to her needs. Anne-Kathrin Segler notes how these qualities contrast with a solid formal rigour visible in the finished work: “the fabrics appear compact or engaged in an organic interaction between folds. Sometimes these bands appear as vertical, sometimes as loose or rolled arches [...] Precision, tactile effect and humour characterize the work of Jorinde Fischer”. Fabrics often refer to draping, but they are synthesized and removed from their original form, giving life to new visions and applications, while steel is used as a structure, a suspension element, a weight, profoundly affecting the dynamics of the composition. “The results oscillate wildly, we want to detect an essence in these curtains, breaks, folds, yet we can not, too minimal the training intervention, too rigorous and clear its conception” - Johannes Bierlein. Two works that exemplify her artistic practice are Together_1 and Momentum. In the first one, she uses elastic material placed together in a series of knots, creating a suspended element that takes shape in space through repeated but never equal volumes. The second artwork represents a precise moment of a movement that can only be guessed as it is shown stationary - locked in an instant. — Text by Laura Pieri

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1 TOGETHER_1 2021 Elastic band H170 x W11 x D10 cm

ARTIST N°40

FROM ITALY

FLORIO LORENA

Lorena Florio (1996, Pescara), currently working between Pescara and Roma, graduated in New Technologies of Art from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. Her photographs that often derive from simple, real-life elements are subjected to different levels of processing and manipulation, both digital and physical, in an attempt to translate the artist’s imaginary into visual images. Her work has been published in the last two issues of Yogurt magazine (Quarantine Flavour and Bad Taste). Lorena Florio has participated in the collective exhibition New Talents 2020, curated by Photographic Exploration Project at the B-Part gallery in Berlin. Lorena Florio’s photographic works are part of the Lacerazioni series, a production that the artist begun during the first lockdown. Lacerazioni is a study that revolves around the act of cutting, as through the cut made on the printed images both the artist and the viewer try to define the interaction between an external agent, light in this case and the support, that is the material on which the image is present. The cut intervenes, dissecting the captured subject - generating an opening - a material, rather sculptural approach to photography, that allows for the what is on the outside to enter the documented field. The totality of visual representation is fragmented. The manual laceration allows for the light to pass through the subjects represented, moreover, depending on the time and climate in which the images are captured, the light that penetrates them during a particular moment of day is different. The artist subsequently reappropriates this crossing, a forced dynamic moment in which the bodies act as a filter and irradiate our field of vision. A minimal gesture, a change of perspective: an enlightenment that is no longer wisdom of the One, but wisdom of the many.

From the “Lacerazioni” series 2020 - 2021 Pigment print on fine art paper 20 x 30 cm 1

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CATALOGUE

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Emerge. Show. Empower.

2/5

ARTIST N°41

FROM ITALY

FRACASSO DAVIDE GIUSEPPE

Davide Giuseppe Fracasso is an Italian artist based in Alessano. He is currently in his third year studying for a BA in Fine Art (Painting) at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. I have always been attracted to puns, mythology, magic and elements strongly linked to the circus world. Some images perceived by Fracasso make such a strong impression that they become imprinted in his head - so much so that they inevitably make their way into his artworks, and they end up creating unexpected hybrids. Davide is interested in creating buoyant, sometimes seemingly senseless, ridiculous and ironic artworks. His goal is to tease the audience, and his Uova installation does exactly that; the artist often uses humour, paradox and the concept of fake news in his works. Uova is an installation that consists of six paintings and a 7’’ video played alongside it. The paintings are made with egg tempera, a witty reference to the title, and correspond perfectly to the colour of the brown eggshell; the number of paintings - six - references the most popular number of eggs in an egg tray. The video shows the six artworks hanged in what resembles a barn with chickens walking around it - one expressing a particular interest in the installation. For me, the installation creates a brilliant parallel and is mocking the way we see and look at art. Often we come to the exhibition spaces and notice endless amounts of people aimlessly walking around the artworks, much like the chickens in Fracasso’s video, not because they are particularly interested in the works shown, but because lately, exhibition spaces became cool places to hang out in. And then occasionally there’s one chicken that takes an interest in the art shown, but perhaps to merely take a picture, to then be posted on its Instagram with a hashtag “cultural”. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 Uova 2020 Installation: Egg tempera on canvas; Video Hexaptych - 60 x 50 cm each; 7’’ 1

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ARTIST N°42

FROM ITALY

GIACCIO DARIAS CARLA

Carla Giaccio Darias (b. 1998) is an Italo-Cuban artist who lives and works between Milan, Rome and Habana. She holds a degree in Architecture and Environment and a BA in Fine Art (Painting and Visual Arts) from NABA. Darias has participated in various exhibitions, among which Women Under the Sky at the Apriti Cielo Association in Milan (2019) and Incontro # 21 Erase to Make a Mark at the Adolfo Pini Foundation in Milan (2019). She recently won the Arte Accademia award of the renowned DucatoPrize (2021). Carla identifies herself mainly as a painter, but her practice is also mixed with other techniques such as sculpture which alternates with the visual dimension. The starting point of her images is the cultural contaminations that the artist has always cultivated, keeping her Cuban roots physically alive while building her environment in Italy. The artist’s travels and different perspectives have allowed her to reinterpret symbolic worlds and study artistic intentions and practices within different perceptions. She sees the animal world as full of symbolism linked to nature and the organic part of terrestrial species, inseparable from her childhood experience. A cosmos represents something beyond, which has always attracted particular attention being out of the ordinary and regularly perceptible. Every day is seen as something surprising and spontaneous in its encounter with the pictorial or sculptural image. An image that can also be charged with negativity but which, through manual work, blends with the intimate and collective experience simultaneously. The interest in these possibilities opens up a discourse on a practice of gaze, sensitivity and love. By defining objects and memories at risk, connected to them, Darias carries out a transformation by not attempting to represent or narrate such objects. Senza titolo painting refers ideally to this concept by proposing an image that is not very recognizable, which requires a closer look to superimpose a narration onto it. As an attachment to life and art, the pivotal point is the resistance that information can arouse. Opening up different considerations concerning painting as a changing material leads to an experimental act that no longer distinguishes a sign from a body, a painting from a sculpture, but transforms matter into pure language. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1 SenzaTitolo 2020 Oil on canvas 50 x 50 cm

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ARTIST N°43

FROM ITALY

GIOACCHINI FRANCESCO

Francesco Gioacchini (1985, Loreto) lives and works in Berlin. Francesco studied editorial communication at the University of Macerata where he graduated in 2011; he attended the summer program in life painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2014 and in 2016 he worked on The Floating Piers, art installation made by Christo at Iseo Lake in Italy. In 2018 he graduated for a second time, obtaining a master’s degree in Painting with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts of Macerata. In 2018 he presented his first solo show in Macerata, Francesco Gioacchini. Missing Days; during the same year he was awarded with the Premio Marche and his winning work has become part of the permanent collection of the Pinacoteca Civica in Ascoli Piceno. In April 2019 he was selected for an Art residency in Berlin with a final group exhibition at Green hill gallery. In 2020 he participated in several group exhibitions in the German capital, in the UK, and he has been selected as one of the finalists of Exibart Prize 2020. At the end of May 2021 he will be holding his first solo show in Berlin at Prenzlauer Studio. “My research moves between drawing, painting and installation and my artworks are a reflection on the boundaries between painting and drawing, past and present, self and other. Starting from references linked to art history, literature and contemporary culture, I carry on a visual research made of collisions of meanings and media. My works show an overlapping and stratification of different elements; sometimes the figures are invaded and challenged by the spray that “claims” its own space, its own presence, in other cases the image appears taped, as a reference for a new work, in other works the painting looks like an exercise book, with notes, scribbles and drawings. There is always a contradictory tension, a juxtaposition of what is different, divided, separate. With a meta-painting approach, I focus on the aesthetics of opposites, of the different, trying to create a language where such dual elements can look at each other and merge.” — Francesco Gioacchini

1 We used to draw on the table (AAAAAAAAAH) 2020 Oil, felt tip pen, marker, pastel, pen and oil stick on canvas 50 x 70 cm

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ARTIST N°44

FROM ITALY

GIORDANI SILVIA

100

Silvia Giordani is an Italian visual artist, based in Venice. She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where she achieved the BD in Painting in 2015 and the MD in Visual and Contemporary Art in 2018. She has been working as an assistant of Anatomy Drawing and Painting at the same Academy. At the moment Silvia Giordani works in Venice, as an assistant of the artist Federica Marangoni. She has participated in group exhibitions such as Flat Rate Contemporary’s eighth (2021), Whatever it takes, A plus A gallery in Venice (2020) and Abstract Mind, CICA Museum in Gimpo, South Korea (2019). As a visual artist, Silvia Giordani works mostly with traditional oil and acrylic painting on canvas and paper. Her practice comes from a personal need to explore the space that surrounds her, in order to find a dimension of slow reality. Her desire elucidates her research approach towards conceptualising mimicry in a metaphorical state of the disorientation of the real. A particular, meticulous combination of acrylic and oil, a play between control, precision and unrestricted movement unfolds, it becomes evident on the pictorial surface that the artist is conscientious with regards to the quality and potential of her medium. Natural landscapes metamorphose into ethereal, whimsical scenes.

1 Telline 2021 Acrylic and oil on canvas 175 x 140 cm

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101

ARTIST N°45

FROM ITALY

GODINO ERIKA

102

Erika Godino (b. 1993) is an Italian artist who currently lives and works in Milan. In 2018 she obtained an MA in Fine Art (Painting) from the Reggio Calabria Academy of Fine Arts. Godino was the finalist of the Art Award 2018 for the Academy Painting section held at Palazzo Reale in Milan. She was involved in various group and solo exhibitions throughout Italy, such as Brera Aperta at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, and Pandemic Communication at Bookcity, Milan, in 2020 and 2021. My artistic research is based on creating a solid visual impact on the interlocutor. Godino aims to create a sentimental connection between her artworks and the viewers. Through mark-making and colours, she constructs emotional solicitation to disorient those observing the work - the reality becomes disturbed through the unconscious of the artist’s mind. The theme of emptiness is the central one in Erika’s research. The void is perceived not as loneliness or abandonment but as the void that we should look for within ourselves. The artist wants us to look for inner peace while we observe the works, immerse ourselves in colour and merge with the piece, forgetting everything that surrounds us: thoughts, emotions, feelings, traumas, challenges, and let go. For Erika, the pieces describe her dream journey, and the title - Viaggio Onirico hints at that. The artwork consists of twenty-one round canvases exhibited alongside each other, engaged in a visual dialogue. Persistent, energetic shapes and delicate forms painted with different shades of crimson red invade the pictorial surface, oscillating between confusion, anxiety, disorder, loneliness and stillness. Godino, however, wishes for the viewers to forget about her, the artist, and what she was feeling and thinking while creating, and instead focus on themselves, go through the process of self-rediscovery, savouring, accepting and celebrating everything that exists within ourselves. Become disoriented, adrift, bewildered - for it is necessary for the process of reclaiming your identity, for the acknowledgement of the self, and embrace everything that exists within us, as well as the external circumstances. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 Viaggio Onirico 2021 Mixed media on paper on a board base Complete installation: 64 x 152 x 4 cm Individual piece: 20 x 20 x 4 cm

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103

ARTIST N°46

FROM MEXICO

GÓMEZ LÓPEZ ROMEO

104

Romeo Gómez López (1991, Mexico City) is a visual artist who works with religion, celebrities, telenovelas, science fiction, and other pop culture references. He is co-founder of Salón Silicón, a gallery that focuses on making visible and disseminating the work of women artists and members of the LGBTI+ community. In 2020 he presented “The Woke Zone” within Siembra at the kurimanzutto gallery, a sexual puppet show performed with hyper-realistic silicone marionettes between two pop singers. That same year he participated in the “OTRXS MUNDXS” exhibition at the Tamayo Museum with his piece “Heteropiedra”, which criticizes the use of stone as a representative material for a sector of heterosexual artists. In 2017 he presented the installation “Lust of the Flesh!” in the group show “Le Gran Luxe” at the Futurama Cultural Center, curated by Daniel Garza Usabiaga. He has had two solo exhibitions, “I want to beliebe” (2018) at Salón Silicón and “Fantastic Voyage” (2019) at LADRÓNgaleria. He has participated in group exhibitions in spaces such as “Artificial Kingdoms” (2019) at the National Center for the Arts curated by PICS and “Young Explorers Camp” (2019) at the Museum of the City of Querétaro. Nightmarish alternate worlds contained in dioramas, puppet sex shows, and toys, are some elements that constitute the work of Romeo Gómez López which represents a resistance to the expectation of compulsory heterosexuality and a personal insight which thrives on humour and pornographic imagination. Romeo uses religion, celebrities, soap operas, science fiction and other references of mass culture, to inject a much-needed and well-deserved dose of faggotry, thus creating a pastiche that criticizes the conservative character that still exists within the Mexican art scene. Romeo Gómez López creates a series of utopian chess sets, the idea was first conceived while watching Star Trek and observing the “TriDimensional” Chess prop. The artist was intrigued by the fact that in a futuristic, sci-fi scenario as such, the hierarchal game would remain a constant and he goes on to create diverse versions of subversive chess sets. The colours are no longer two but four, the players will loose track of their pieces, the architecture of multiple-platform structure and arrangement of the pieces will not allow for one to overthrow another, the war ceases.

1 Futuristic chess utopia 2021 Plexiglass, chess pieces, iron structure 60 x 30 x 50 cm

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ARTIST N°47

FROM GERMANY

GROOT TOBIAS

106

Tobias Groot (he/him, Hoorn, Netherlands, 1994) is currently based in Berlin and is working with photography, CGI and Artificial Intelligence. He received his bachelor’s degree in Photography from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and has since exhibited work throughout the Netherlands, while being the Photographer in Residence at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Groot’s digital conglomerations contend with artificial intelligence and humans’ fleshy embodied experience. Capturing nonexistent worlds without real people. applying physical experiences onto virtual bodies. Tobias Groot digitally simulates intimate scenarios, human flesh takes on a newfound 3D-animated quality as the artist explores relations and physical closeness during a time when individuals exist and interact in the virtual space. Computergenerated unearthly bodies float and intertwine in video loops, they split into liquid forms in a way that is anatomically impossible, as Groot researches the ways in which one can experience sexuality in a post-human, non-physical space. Through glitching abstract matter visuals and uncomfortable the manoeuvring of shape-shifter beings, the artist demonstrates his interest towards depicting carnality in the cyber age. A glimpse from the artist’s latest mixed media project, First, they gave me bones (2021), a dyptich of two prints on aluminium, opening up at times and unveiling the cold metal underneath. The borders between the material and the virtual worlds become thinner as the digital image becomes tangible and is brought into physical space. Scratching the Surface (2019) “centers around a science-fiction narrative of a humanless future” (Tobias Groot). While creating the piece, the artist had been teaching an algorithm how to imitate his own writing, the scrolling text an unintentionally encrypted compilation of personal diary entries — AI poetry. Behind these words, a one-take scene of the digital rubber-like skin as it crumbles and moves, almost recognizable. Familiar surfaces and shapes, faces and body parts are deconstructed, ever-transforming, in an attempt to define an incorporeal state of being. — Paola Shiamtani

1 Scratching the Surface 2019 Video 16’

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ARTIST N°48

FROM ITALY

GUARNERI DUCCIO

108

“There is no movement without rhythm”. Malinke Proverb

Duccio Guarneri (b. 1994) is an Italian artist who lives and works between Cremona and Brescia. He holds a BA in Artistic Decoration from the Santa Giulia Academy of Fine Arts and is currently studying for an MA in Contemporary Visual Arts. Guarneri’s artistic research draws inspiration from scenography and theatre, influencing his visual poetics. This allows him to broaden his vision and start from the medium itself. For Duccio, the framework is limiting and linked to the concept of finite and static – he creates dimensions in which the viewer is invited to enjoy the work by engaging multiple senses, not just sight. The scenario he intends to explore through his work comes from the memory of a place that he defines as the preplace: “neologism indicates the archetypal dimension of the rarefied and enveloping entity, the fruit of the union between figuration and the evanescence of the dream. Within this dimension, there are two components, a pro scenic and a scenic, figure and landscape: they are two very distinct realities, each of them residing within the universe of the work.” In Subsidence, the artist is interested in directly involving the Observer by presenting an environmental installation work consisting of a modular PVC pipe with speakers placed on the inside. Guarneri says: “The work is changeable, it changes shape and dimensions according to space at its disposal, thus becoming a dynamic work, engaged in everlasting movement and search for the involvement of the sensitive spheres of sight, touch, hearing. A movement is an unpredictable event, as well as sound and rhythm. These elements make up our days. You do not know what will happen, nor where you will go. The current carries you. A metaphor for all this is an intricate line of tubes, the same ones we use to build the ramifications underground, usually invisible to the eye, just like our cognitive process. [The speakers] reproduce different sounds: percussion, drums, train whistles, subway, sampled noises, mixed to create a concerto of rhythms that converge in a meta Symphony, creating a sequence of sounds as well as silences.” — Text by Laura Pieri

1 Subsidence 2020 PVC, speakers H150 x W150 x D100 cm

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ARTIST N°49

FROM RUSSIA

GUKUN ALEXANDER

110

Alexander Gukun (b. 2006) is a Russian artist who lives and works in Moscow. The installation piece entitled Physical Soul is a debut for Gukin; the complexity, profundity and intensity of thought behind the artwork have impressed me deeply. Physical Soul is an interactive art therapy installation. The exhibit consists of multiple elements, the central one being a pair of trousers and a t-shirt sewn together, instantly referring to a human figure, and in fact, the artwork represents the human Soul. Seemingly bright and colourful on the outside with its watermelon pink and indigo blue, the longer I study it, the more inconsistencies I notice regarding that supposedly cheerful figure. Not only is the body asymmetrical, once taken a closer look, but we also notice the unevenness of embroidery, breaking and creasing; the inscriptions that read entrance and no exit, instinctively, I’m looking for the word exit that is nowhere to be seen and so I’m trapped, without even realising it, inside the sewn lines. The feeling of entrapment, perhaps due to the colours used by Alexander, reminds me of the same sensation of being captured when looking at Peter Halley’s paintings. Physical body is each and every one of us. How many of us are being conditioned by and are suffering from past traumas, limitations imposed on our identities by society, or simply drowning in everyday struggles - keeping all those inside ourselves, being slowly eaten by anxiety, pain and dissatisfaction? The artist wants us to interact with the installation by releasing some harmful thoughts by writing what’s bothering, hurting, or simply anything one wants to share but doesn’t yet dare to - on blank sheets of paper placed next to the figure. Write it. Release it from within yourself. Drop it inside the figure. And if you aren’t sure yet, slide your hand inside and get a feel of what’s there - you shall discover the notes others have disposed of, some are simply crumpled, some are tied with colourful threads, and some are poked with needles - these represent childhood grievances and unresolved psychological trauma. Occasionally you’ll come across several clear boxes containing sparkles and various charms - these represent the good memories - unfortunately, amidst the overwhelming majority of the rest of the notes, these boxes are practically unnoticeable. Write. Release. Drop. I know I will. I wouldn’t be able to put it better than Alexander did: This exhibit can be filled until it cracks at the seams, but it is better to break an artwork than your Soul from the inside. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

Physical Soul Interactive installation Variable dimensions

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ARTIST N°50

FROM ITALY

GURGONE CAMILLA

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Camilla Gurgone (b. 1997) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Rome. In 2020 she obtained a BA in Fine Art (Sculpture) from RUFA University in Rome. Before receiving her degree, Gurgone undertook a thesis research work at UPV / EHU in Bilbao, where she won the BilbaoArte GRANTS residency, curated by Juan Zapater. Her research revolves around the limits and paradoxes linked to society, crises, and diversities that we encounter through environments and familiar places. During her studies, Camilla was involved in numerous initiatives, workshops and exhibitions, winning the Rome Jaguart roadshow in 2020 organised by Artissima and Jaguar Italia. She is currently working on multiple projects together with galleries and associations in Northern and Central Italy. Accidents, breakdowns, sudden pipe breakages and water leaks - these are neither accidental nor symptomatic explosions of the often remote but recurring events that destabilise our daily routines within the safe space that is our home. Faced with this complexity, made up of small things that suddenly become huge, the artist, in her two sculptures Pronto, fa Acqua da Tutte le Parte and Fix the Leaky Faucet, Please from the larger Problemi di Idraulica installation, suddenly becomes a resolute worker, throws herself headlong into this chaos and illustrates an extensive field of issues. Impersonating respectable and useful professions, she takes the consolidated practice of assimilation, simultaneously deforming, through the transgressive use of this possession, the bourgeois and the official status of the same, common patrimony of the same subjects struggling with their ego. Against the cliché that being an artist is not a serious job, this sprawling and camouflage takes on a playful and at the same time corrosive aspect. In this fictional game, where problems are turned over, the viewer is invited to participate, to make an aesthetic experience out of this dysfunctionality that has exploded formally and conceptually. This creates a short circuit that complicates the relationship between reality and fiction, creating a plot for the exchange and, through a wide range of implications – captures within the installation the stereotypes and prejudices, trivia and vulgarity. — Text by Maria Myasnikova and Mattia Cucurullo

1 Fix the leaky faucet, please 2021 Wood, microfiber mats, glass, brass tap, painted plaster H120 x W49 x D55 cm

ARTIST N°51

FROM SWITZERLAND

HARLACHER LUCA

114

Luca Harlacher (b. 1993) is a Swiss artist who lives and works between Zurich and Winterthur holding a BA in Fine Art. His works demonstrate a playful approach to the abundance, fuelled by the accessibility of the internet that we are surrounded by every day: thoughts streams, sensory impressions - some stored, others forgotten - we are showered with imagery and become overloaded by it. Harlacher processes those impulses through his works and creates connections between them, triggering movements, thus providing the chaos that exists externally and within a new form. His source materials derive from all places imaginable: he works with consumer and found objects, childhood memories, everyday life impressions, the internet as well as fantasy elements that range from figurative and clear to those abstract. All those act as an alphabet in his artistic language. As Luca puts it: Their colourful, often trashy exterior make my nested worlds initially accessible, but they simultaneously and repeatedly refer to the problematic aspects of our time. The mixed media paintings presented at the Fair - Tinkering Models, Then Forget the Rules and Climbing up to the Flying Gifts are accompanied by the Le Chiffonnier’s Magic Tower sculpture. The works are an explosion of colours, shapes, symbols, textures, and seemingly random imagery - there’s something for everyone. Goats, umbrellas, castles, scales, faces... I’m simultaneously intrigued, confused, excited, curious, and overwhelmed by examining the works’ surfaces. The paintings are consuming, and I can’t take my gaze off them, as every time my eye wanders around the pictorial surface, I notice more and more details. The works make me feel joyful, playful, child-like - everything about them is tasty, perhaps due to the colours that the artist works with; I want to interact with, touch them and feel the various textures present. According to recent studies, the average time a person spends looking at a piece of art in an exhibition space is between fifteen and thirty seconds. I firmly believe that Harlacher’s pieces will enchant you for a significantly more considerable amount of time. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 Tinkering models, then forget the rules 2021 Mixed media on canvas 105 x 130 cm

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ARTIST N°52

FROM USA

HAUGE LAUREL

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Laurel Hauge (b. 1994) is an American artist and writer who lives and works in Milan. She holds a BA in Fine Art, as well as being a co-founder, together with her partner Lele Buonerba, of Have a Nice Day Press which develops editorial projects around artists’ work related to current Internet culture. In 2020 Hauge exhibited the installation I think about / all the things I could reach / before you a North Pole Exhibitions in Chicago, while in 2016, she took part in a show with All These Things at Bowtruss-Pilsen in Chicago. In 2018 she participated in the Endless Editions Biennial: Optimism project, curated by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, New York. Laurel has an intense fascination with the aesthetics of objects and devices developed and created according to their function rather than their shape. In this sense, she was influenced by her own professional experiences. For some time, the artist had collaborated with and assisted artists in the production and construction of the works. This allowed her to think about the development and birth of an object, particularly a work of art, its statute and its specific setup needs. The tasks, gestures, and equipment make up the basis for the simplest acts, such as hand movement when dividing something in two. Hauge studies the aspects that are often taken for granted in the production and display of objects. Her practice includes various techniques ranging from photography to video and performance, but her most intimate works - which focus on themes from her personal experiences - are often made in writing through exploring a narrative. Part of this is the video installation which tells a particular moment in Laurel’s life through an impersonal and robotic voice. The images of the ocean and seas between New York and the Italian coasts collected by Google Earth, combined with the mechanical narrative, dwell on the feelings of displacement, separation and uncertainty that she experienced during the year and a half in which she had lived in New York. The glitch, the low resolution and the difficulty in discerning monochrome images reflect the many complexities that the relationship between the artist and her partner had to face over the long distance. Although the work comes from a personal experience, it opens a broader discourse on the mediation of the internet and its instrumentalisation for relationships, without which certain emotional situations could not exist. Despite this, the video’s content grieves about the loss of contact and visceral interaction, which transcends the perception of the incompleteness of the experience. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1 Hauge Laurel I think about all the things I could reach before you 2020 Single-channel video 2’52”

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ARTIST N°53

FROM FRANCE

118

HOLST SEVANA

Sevana Holst is a French-American writer and visual poet. She studied History at the Sorbonne and Persian Studies at the INALCO (language research institute), starting her professional life as an independent translator and writer (collaborating on theatres and artists in Paris). Her work focuses on exploring the limits and aesthetics of language through visual and concrete poetry (taking inspiration from other female visible and tangible poets, such as Susan Howe, Paula Claire, Giulia Niccolai...). Through her work, she combines both visual and literary realms in search of a complete desacralization of both the text and the image. She is based in Paris, France. Bribes et essais is a long-form piece created with an Olivetti studio 44 typewriter, on upcycled granulated paper, from an old iconographer workshop in Paris. It is an evolutive reflection on Time and the Self that exists through a continuum of experts of poems and thoughts written by the artist- a patchwork stream of consciousness. The letters are woven together on the page, mirroring the written themes through their physical form and structure. Here, the literary and visual realms work together to desacralize the text and the image whilst adding layers of meaning to the page. — Text by Pelin Zeytinci 1

1-2 Untitled 2 2020 Mixed media

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ARTIST N°54

IKUM BASIL

FROM SWITZERLAND

120

Basil Ikum (1998, Switzerland) lives and works in Basel / Bern. He is currently developing his practice and studying Fine Arts at Institut Kunst, Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst FHNW, Basel. Basil Ikum has participated in group exhibitions at; the Nomad Design & Lifestyle Hotel Basel (May 2021) and Alte Schreinerei Bern (December 2020). In his work, Basil Ikum explores the relation of art and consumerism and the ordinariness of branding that surrounds him in every-day life. Ikum Basil paints in a fast-paced, spontaneous manner, using a combination of different materials such as acrylic paint, spray paint and oil-pastels. Through typography and decontextualisation of visual advertising the artist tampers with widely recognisable logos and forms in a humorous way, twisting words. Tension is generated between the elements on the pictorial surface as Ikum intuitively adds strokes of colour and unrefined, playful outlines to the compositions in order to suggest the presence of an item for instance. Basil Ikum also often directly paints onto found objects whether those are abandoned paintings, carpets or wooden pallets, contaminating and transfiguring them; a process which allows for the artist to reflect upon their own impulsive activity, creative decisions and aesthetic purpose. A game between opaque, semi-transparent and transparent layers tests the viewer’s gaze and calls for them to question their own perception of the fragmented icons, symbols and marks. Ikum’s installative interventions bring the domestic yet also the suburban and the outdoors into the exhibition space, meddling with contemporary society’s preconceived notions of artworks as opposed to commodities, he repurposes and depicts mundane objects in unconventional manners in order to build an environment of genuine contemplation — a disruption of compulsive consumerist behaviour.

1 IKUM 2021 2021 Spraypaint, acrylic and marker on shower curtain 180 x 200 cm Ikum Basil Abstract neon series 2021 Spraypaint, acrylic, marker and pencil on canvas, each is 60 x 80 cm

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ARTIST N°55

FROM FRANCE

INCULTE REJETON

122

inculte-rejeton (b. 1986) is a French multidisciplinary artist holding a BA in Fine Art who lives and works in Milan. His artistic practice starts from the observation of what is tangible by acquiring data that he then combines and transforms, creating other possible realities synthesized through the use of different mediums. Behind inculte-rejon’s research lies the questioning of what we perceive and consider indisputably true, questioning everything: “what is behind what we see?”. Through his art, he invites us to reflect on a philosophy of science that leads to a renewed consideration of matter and spirit, time and space. The artist’s vision is mainly focused on taking the scientific and the philosophical concerning the reality - corroborating the idea that our world is reduced to the mere representation of what we perceive, based on the doctrines and physical characteristics of quantum mechanics - such as those theorized by JeanÉmile Charon and Bernard d’Espagnat - and building bridges with various concepts related to those principles. He then deals with abstruse, turning to art, as it acts as a metaphysical thought that allows him to bypass conventional understanding: gravity no longer exists, objects become animated, and bodies are deformed. This exercise of thought leads inculte-rejon to realize real visual allegories, sometimes sarcastic, often close to the fantasy film with the primary purpose of provoking and dispelling our previous convictions. An example of the reflections he poses and addresses the viewer is found in the ballpoint pen drawing entitled Drifting Fantasies. The artist says: “This work inspires the happiness of completed research. But is it a man linked to his audacity or the desire to embark? What is the other’s perspective? Where is he going after achieving his goal? Is this result at least real or a fantasy or the trick of a mirage?”. The point of view that led to the realization of the Inner Horizon is fascinating: “From the stoic point of view, the world is made up of a mutual interweaving of all its elements. The lungs breathe oxygen atoms while the wind blows through the lungs. So, everything is in everything, crossed by one breath - pneuma. In that case, a fish lives as much in its vessel as the latter lodges its contents in the animal. Is our identity in perpetual motion? Does it make sense to define a personality when a universal dynamic drives it?” — Text by Laura Pieri

1 Drifting fantasies 2020 Ballpen on Bristol paper 65 x 50 cm

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ARTIST N°56

FROM ITALY

ITALIANO ANGELA

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Angela Italiano (b. 1996) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Cortina D’Ampezzo. She holds a BA in Fine Art (Painting) from the Venice Academy of Fine Arts. Aside from being an artist, Italiano also works as a multidisciplinary art teacher at the Liceo Artistico. My artistic research focuses on the analysis of the landscape and the investigation of the interdependent phenomena of Catastrophe and its creation. Angela begins by studying and reinterpreting the underlying constituent elements of the landscape, reflecting on the symbolism loaded within it, to then radicalise the point of view on the primaeval dimension. As she breaks down each element, the process of disintegration itself becomes the focus of each artwork’s journey, seeking the essence of the transcendent bond between Man and Nature. Her research takes a particular look at the concept of footprint; a visual narrative becomes apparent, and it invites an awareness of the importance of guarding the wonder that emanates all that surrounds us, enhances its fragility, therefore creating the need to protect it. The artistic project entitled The Last Breath analyses the ongoing metamorphosis of nature through the emblematic element of Fire. For the Fair, the artist presents two paintings from this series - The Last Breath 2 and 3 - one engulfed by raging Fire, perfectly captured with its amber oranges and marigold yellows; the other, perhaps its consequence - raven black, resembling coal - burned to the ground, still and lifeless. Through visual storytelling, the viewers are confronted with the environmental consequences of human behaviour. The works draw inspiration from recent catastrophic events such as the fires in the Amazon, Yosemite and California and foreshadow a future where a man prevails irretrievably over other forms of life. The Last Breath invites reflection and an awareness that pushes us to protect nature and its fragility to cure and guard the wonders of our world. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 The Last Breath 2 2021 Oil on canvas 120 x 90 cm

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ARTIST N°57

KING SAM

FROM UNITED KINGDOM

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Sam King (b.1995) is a British artist who lives and works in London. He holds a BA in Fine Art from The Art Academy in London, where he developed technical skills and formed the conceptual basis of his artistic research. Sam received various awards, including The Jorge-Aguilar Artist Award and the Liberty Art Award in 2019 and in 2020, he was shortlisted for the ACS Studio Prize. Since 2018 he has participated in a series of group exhibitions in Asia and Europe. Through his artistic practice, King investigates the subjectivity embodied in the digital age, highlighting the contradictions of living and contemporary experience characterized by the dispersion of identity between the physical and the digital world. We find the basis of this research in the exploration of the human condition in time aimed at disrupting the notions of identity: those built-in and imposed by the society, to find a connection to the primordial with the self: “The resulting work deals with universal concepts of creation and destruction, to be or not to be, fullness and nothing [...] Addressing the issues of being, spirituality, mortality and incarnation, he strips the physical boundaries of the body, to reveal it as the active place where meaning is produced” – the Flux Review. Interested in the idea of removal to achieve incomplete and transient states, along with the classic oil painting technique, the artist uses various creative and destructive processes, including kneading, burning, cutting and dragging to alter and change the figure and surface. The main subject of his compositions is the body, painted with the combination of historical art techniques - such as chiaroscuro and dramatic composition - and digital distortion; he uses different material processes to address a monolithic representation of corporeity. “My latest series, of which Pietas is part, combines traditional oil painting with airbrushed fades to form a dialogue between past and present: the authentic and coherent narrative of the flat and glossy aesthetics of the digital screen together with the fragmentary experience of consumerism. My work elicits contradictory sensory and emotional responses to reveal the contingent nature of incarnation and the subversive possibilities of representation. By synthesizing alternative interpretations of the body, my practice aims to transgress the experiential boundaries imposed by contemporary culture”. — Text by Laura Pieri

1 Pietas 2020 Oil on canvas 147 x 100 cm 1

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ARTIST N°58

FROM AUSTRALIA

LENNON OLIVIA CONCETTA

128

Olivia Lennon Concetta (b. 1988) is an Australian artist who lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the National Art School in Sydney in 2010, and then started her career as an artist, taking part in numerous exhibitions in Australia, the United States, Germany, and France, including the Los Angeles Centre for Digital Art, Los Angeles, U. S. A.; Vzor Studio with Neuköllner Produktion, Berlin, Germany, and Exgirlfriend Gallery in Berlin, Germany. Lennon’s research has recently shifted to issues of political importance, focusing on the necropolitics of the European Mediterranean border. Her last work starts with evidence that most of the marble extracted in Europe comes from today’s same areas, the western frontiers, and not the West itself. The same places where many people die daily in the hope of crossing that border and reaching everything that Europe represents. Olivia, through a series of visual references, introduces us to a reality that is still little known, for example, the patrolling of the maritime boundaries, which are exercised in a way that is as sophisticated and deadly as, for example, ships and surveillance drones that are way out of legal obligation in international maritime law to directly save a person who is drowning - because a drone can not board the passengers. Using marble shapes and colours, the Borderstone watercolour series investigates a series of blocking elements, barricades and surveillance tools to criticise new practices and contemporary technologies used at EU borders in the context of the continent’s growing ethnic-nationalist politics. Marble thus becomes synonymous with a hardness no longer of extreme charm but becomes solid and hard body due to the constriction and destruction of the same places from which it comes. Her research is not limited to a visual investigation. The artist uses watercolour to create images, with multiple and meticulous details created through a long and painstaking process made of many layers of watercolour. This process helps her interpret the ideas built on paper to have a longer and more careful time of reflection and study than the argument that will be suggested. Lennon always makes use of this technique to conceive of works of different nature and with other interests, with constant attention to details and using long periods on one topic at a time, in such a manner as to be able to enter, with the gesture and the sign, in the different layers that a study requires. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1 Drone (A Continuous low Humming Sound / a Male bee in a Colony of Social Bees, Which Does no Work but can Fertilize a Queen)’ 2019 Watercolour and graphite on rag paper 50 x 70 cm 2 Obelisk (A tapering Stone Pillar, set up as a Monument or Landmark) 2019 Watercolour and graphite on rag paper 50 x 70 cm

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ARTIST N°59

FROM ITALY

LOCATELLI GIULIO

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Giulio Locatelli (b. 1993) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Bergamo. He holds an MA in Fine Art (Painting) from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. In 2020 Locatelli participated in several awards and group exhibitions: Think BIG! curated by Francesca Canfora in Turin and Extroversions curated by Ghiggini Arte in Varese. In 2021 he participated in the group exhibitions MINIARTEXTIL curated by Paolo Bolpagni, Sonia D’Alto, Giovanni Berera and Festina Stonata curated by Luogo. Giulio was among the finalists of the COMBAT Prize, Laguna Art Prize, and the Nocivelli Prize curated by Ilaria Mariotti and the YICCA Award curated by The Rivoli 2 Association. His artistic research is based on wire and paper, used as a tool of analysis and reflection and the basic materials of his works. The images that emerge desire to create visions of the world that are not reduced to known places and spaces but allow glimpses of ghostly and changing forms. The artist says: “The reflection starts from the English term landscape, as this term speaks of lands and escape, of a space in which to get lost and escape, with the anxiety of overcoming the finitude of borders and places of the collective imagination. Driven by the desire to cross and contaminate that limit that arises between the languages of painting and sculpture, The Wire has thus given life to indeterminate forms, open to different connections that through the wire are given shape. Filaments, skeins, knots and tangles that become symbols of relationships, friendships and awareness”. Aspects that are persistent in his works are accumulation, storage and sediment that we also find in the Il Libro Delle Seppie made from a series of sheets of handmade paper, stacked and sewn together – plain paper, yet they are rich in marks and scratches so perfectly legible, that we read in them the encounters, moods, stages, kilometres. This work was born from a reflection on the Japanese word tsundoku - a word used to indicate the practice of buying books, leaving them on the shelf and never reading them: however, the work is presented as a book only in form and not in the function, the wires make the text utterly inaccessible by denying the possibility of reading. The artist asks us to trust the artwork in the same way that the pilgrim puts trust towards the journey yet to be made. — Text by Laura Pieri

1 Il libro delle seppie 2020 Paper and thread H26 x W50 x D26 cm

ARTIST N°60

FROM ITALY

LONGA MARTA

132

Marta Longa (b. 1995) is an Italian artist who lives and works between Milan and Erba. She holds an MA in Fine Art (Sculpture) from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. I constantly look for new narratives, for a language I can speak to the viewer in, project my view of the world, and make one see beyond what already exists in one’s mind. Longa is looking for the tension that pushes us forward, to examine the things from the inside; she is interested in the concept of space and its possibilities. The gestures used in her artworks are soft, delicate and fragile; they reside within small intimate spaces - we as viewers recognise that those are special, cherished places and are compelled, quite naturally, to treat them the way they’re supposed to - with quiet fascination. We relate to the artworks through the parallel they create between that intimate, fragile space within us that we all have. Lately, the concept of responseability, developed by Donna Haraway - an American philosopher and professor became central in Marta’s practice. As Haraway puts it: Response-ability is about both absence and presence, killing and nurturing, living and dying - and remembering who lives and who dies. The artist interprets it as a commitment to be present within the process achieved through cultivation and taking care of something; she believes that the construction and reconstruction of opening up the vast field of relationships between ourselves and the things around us are within our capacity. Ricucio (Ferite Aperte) is a sculptural wall installation consisting of twelve dried sage leaves sown with cotton threads. Longa uses shades of the forest, olive and hunter green, to accentuate the openings that naturally occurred inside the slightly faded sage leaves. The artwork title suggests those be open wounds, and the artist to be sowing them shut, or perhaps merely making them evident enough for us and the others to notice them and treat us with care? — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 (Ricucio) Ferite aperte 2021 Dried sage, cotton threads Installation takes up 30 x 35 cm

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CATALOGUE

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Art is the new sexy.

3/5

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ARTIST N°61

LUZI ANDREA

FROM ITALY

136

He was born on 8 October 1997 in Ancona. He works and lives between Urbino and Filottrano. Graduated in 2017 from the Edgardo Mannucci Art High School in Jesi, the interest was mainly directed towards music, improvisation, drawing, and wall painting, and consequently, an interest in painting on canvas also arrived. He attended the three-year course of decoration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino, while now he is attending editions and illustrations for graphic art for the master’s degree in the same academy. In 2019 the Hardchitepture installation writing project was born, composed by Lorenzo Conforti and Vittorio Zeppillo, guys from the Marche underground. In 2020 his first publication, “Coding of a wild style: Insights in the sign and the tache”, is released, a collection of drawings on paper. The proposed images appear to be an iconographic mix; through an aesthetic of the VS, The artist offers suggestive battles between iconographies (both from the football and musical world) through the eye of the video game, thus highlighting an ironic tragedy. At first glance, the image may be poster-like, flat, but as it approaches, it reveals itself in its not well-defined acid stratification that occupies foggy, hazy spaces. Andrea involves us in a discontinuous vision, in a continuous rethinking of matter, transporting us to impromptu architectures dictated mainly through improvisation, the painting. As soon as it is completed, it becomes the trigger for the next one. This attention to his creative process, which is shown and revealed in all its phases, derives from a strong influence of the patchanka culture, where results and stimuli are continually renewed and rethought. Andrea is a first-person witness of collective activities, everyday experiences where the creative act is made up and shared by several people. In this regard, it is essential to underline his participation in the Hardchitepture installation writing project, founded in recent years with Lorenzo Conforti and Vittorio Zeppillo. The collective of Marche artists is engaged in translation of the basic principles of graffiti in environmental installations, sculptures (usually in situ) of an underground character composed of discarded objects, rubbish, ready to change through colour combinations and interventions. - Alberto Rota — Text by Pelin Zeytinci

1 Framed 50 x 70 cm 2021 Oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas 90 x 80cm

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ARTIST N°62

FROM BRAZIL, ESPANA

138

MACHADO LUAN

Born in Curitiba (Brazil), he began his research in Butoh at the University of Arts of Paraná (2012) where there he presented his first butoh solo “RUSS” (inspired by the trilogy of Kazuo Ohno, “My Mother”) in theaters, abandoned spaces, festivals, shows, on the streets and in unconventional spaces. Danced with Zé do Caixão (famous film director of horror films) in 2014 in the video “Maldito -Zé do Caixão” in Brazil. He started training Butoh Public Classes at the MAM (Modern Art Museum, Rio de Janeiro) in 2014, where he teached for 5 years there. Until now he teaches Butoh doing workshops mixing with video dances lessons and productions. In 2015, he danced butoh in New York with interventions and presentations of solos by the public spaces of the city, where he created his second solo, SAINT MARIA; a solo that he performs only in cemeteries. This work was performed in Queens-NYC, Brazil, Père Lachaise-Paris and Barcelona (2016), Milan (2019).In 2020 he was at Butoh Festival Amsterdam performing his solo “DEAD ZONE’’ and “RUSS” and at Mandala Performance Festival in Poland performing “I’M NOT A ROBOT”. A lipsing operetta from the butoh-queer universe. The colorful flag that defends the difference, the body violated by the prejudices of society is printed in words and gestures on the scene. A contemporary remix of the noises of technology shot from dating apps, pop music, the performer’s authoritative voice in electronic beats coming from the dance floor where voguing, glamor-trash, the exacerbation of symbols inhabiting the POSE aesthetic. The world’s contradiction in categorizing the body (which is free) in formats set by the standards imposed by advertising, commercials and the appeal to the beautiful. This work is a satire of the beautiful, the perfection that does not exist, the exploded illusion, sodoma-gomorra clubber, the state of war in belonging and being in the tedious world that employs the regular. This colored and melted body purges the salt from the earth, the invocation of the demons that were once violated by the oppression that silenced and today takes this body and is represented by shadows and shapeless forms. With its essence butoh; dance created in postwar Japan that expresses pain, Hiroshima bomb, chaos, hope, fetus-body and disillusionment in poetry, meets the hysterical queer universe crammed with glitter and accessories, transforms the body of the performer in a ghostly and erotic ritual, the grotesque peep-show of distorted sensuality. The story of this body that dances comes from the tropical lands, imbued with an indigenous and black ancestry, when dancing, invokes its ancestors who already suffered with the exploration of the body, the migration of relatives across the continents add to the impulses and movements, sometimes choreographed, sometimes reverberated through space, passing through the Artaudian body through the elements of illumination and somnoplasty, make this body a dark and fun possession. — Text by Pelin Zeyticni

1 I’M NOT A ROBOT Performance

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ARTIST N°63

FROM FRANCE

MARQUES FABIEN

140

Fabien Marques (1982) is a French visual artist based in Udine, Italy. He gained his MA Visual Arts at Sint-Lukas Brussels University College of Art and Design after completing a BA (Hons) Fine Art Photography at the Glasgow School of Art. His artworks have been shown in the context of numerous exhibitions and festivals such as the Copenhagen Photo Festival and the Glasgow Festival for Visual Arts. He has taken part in exhibitions, among others at Galerie CC in Malmö, Sweden, and Salon de Montrouge. He has has been recently a finalist for Foundation Francesco Fabbri Prize for contemporary photography. Fabien Marques is a visiting lecturer at Lille University, France and a member of AWI, Art Workers Italia. The photographic image is central to the practice of Fabien Marques. His works often stem from historical and scientific investigations and usually, explore territories marked by invisible stories. From intensive research, he reconstructs a constellation of iconographic and textual elements that illuminate and recontextualize historical or particular events. The Distinctions is a research-based project exploring our understanding and acceptance of novelty through food, colour, and daily practices. It starts from the artist’s visit to the Porta Palazzo farmer market in Turin in June 2018 and his discovery of Momordica Charantia: a South American and Asian fruit known as Bitter Gourd, which became a staple in the stalls of the Chinese vendors. The indigenous vegetable is taken as the symbolic embodiment of the foreign as a transient state: what is the ‘exotic’? How long does it take for the ‘exotic’ to become normalised? Using the photograph of Bitter Gourd as a source for extracting its colours, the artist developed a series of artworks influenced by colour perception. Through the interaction between photographic documentation and physical objects, this work delves into the cultural habit of incorporating exoticism into everyday life and challenges our way of experiencing colour and our visual culture’s defining standards. The research project is named after Pierre Bourdieu’s book “La distinction: critique sociale du jugement, which addresses the socio-cultural processes of developing taste. The Distinctions has been initiated in Turin, within the residency studio program at Cripta747, with the help of Alliance Française.

1 The Distinctions 2019-2020 Installation Variable dimensions Photo credit: Alessandro Ruzzier

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ARTIST N°64

FROM ITALY

MATTIA GIORGIO

142

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143

Giorgio Mattia (b. 1997) is an Italian artist who lives and works between Rome and Milan. He holds a BA in Fine Art (Painting and Visual Arts) from NABA. He took part in various exhibitions, including Broken Falls of the Angels - the fourth exhibition of the cycle “Incontri” – at Studio Rouge in Milan and Erase to Mark at the Fondazione Pini in Milan - both of 2019. Giorgio’s research examines the concept of sacred from different points of view; one linked more to the actual artistic practice – taking into account this theme within the language of Contemporary Art – the other with a philosophical imprint for which he analyzes the term itself expanding its meaning. This process has led him to identify an idea of the sacred no longer as something exclusively transcendental that is above the world but reconsidering it in immanent terms and then within the world, as this is the only field of investigation available. Mattia says: “The reflection on language has been and is inexorable within my research, which evolves even living in a metalinguistic state, retreating to itself and reflecting on its dynamics. So it would be fair to say that my practice lives in a dichotomy between a conscious and unconscious state, natural feeling and reflection on how it was made to feel, between vision and cognition. Inexorable is the reflection on the role of art, on the role of my art, which as already mentioned starts thinking about its ways and seeks its possibilities”. The Viandanti series consists of five small drawings made in pencil and placed on shelves made with different materials using various techniques. Taken from images from his archive, the artist reworks them through the unconscious juxtaposition of elements. This process has created a generated sense and not a prerequisite for an open narrative in which all individual elements participate simultaneously and are inextricably linked. Once again, Mattia explains perfectly the meaning of his research: “The passage of the drawing becomes essential, and through the loss of formal information, you may disclose, with more force, its nature within the image. It can now become defined as pre-theoretical, therefore not orally explicable, but only through a direct emanation. In these drawings, I then look for something that in a sense is behind the image.” — Text by Laura Pieri

1 Viandanti 2021 Pencil on paper, wood, metal, cardboard, strings, ceramics, plastic 25 x 100 x 10 cm

ARTIST N°65

FROM ITALY

MINELLI ILARIA

144

Ilaria Minelli (b. 1995) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Bologna. She holds a BA in Fine Art (Painting) from the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts and an MA in Visual Arts, focusing on installation techniques, sculpture, video, and photography. Since 2016, Minelli has taken part in various group and solo exhibitions. In 2019 she performed in Prospect < E V A > by Michele Rizzo and Billy Bultheel, during the Live Arts Week VIII; a solo show P420 in Bologna Armerìa, curated by Alberto Ceresoli and Vaku Project Space in Bergamo; CASAMATTA Discontinuity curated by Valentina Baldelli and Simone Giacomoni at Fano and Sexxx & Pop, curated by Pier Giorgio Carizzoni at Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan in 2020. Minelli’s commitment and involvement in educational and social projects made her reflect on the political message that her works can convey and transmit, implying that the personal is profoundly political and meaningful, as we as humans are social and therefore culturally conditioned. This awareness was gradually formed until she grew to prefer the liberal interpretation of her last series of works. The observer must not feel bound to a pre-established meaning, but his thought must be born through direct comparison, thus giving life to personal elaborations generating a constructive dialogue around and with the work itself. Ilaria’s compositions are often an overlap of opposing materials and aesthetics. This aspect of her practice is evident in the Armerìa series in which the artist applies pink ostrich feathers to the blades of potentially dangerous objects from different contexts – cooking, gardening, collecting and crafts. Feathers have the function of censoring danger by giving it a different meaning and an aesthetic of fetish. For the artist: “This opens a reflection on contemporary society; the work focuses on the disproportionate use of violence to the point of becoming itself a fetish for humanity.” The act of neutralization makes the weapons almost harmless, making the work assume an ironically political position, in which the objects become extensions of gestures made harmless through the materials and the colour. — Text by Laura Pieri

1 Armerìa 2018-2021 Mixed media Variable dimensions

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The work mostly revolves around the disproportionate use of violence, to the point that violence itself becomes a 1

fetish of humanity.

ARTIST N°66

FROM ITALY

MIOTTO ILARIA

146

Ilaria Miotto (b. 1995) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Venice. She holds a BA in Fine Art (Visual and Performing Arts) from the Venice Academy of Fine Arts; Miotto is currently studying for an MA at the same Academy. In 2020 she participated in the artist residency in Gad, Venetian Foundation, and later took part in a group exhibition organised by the foundation. Each work represents a mental dimension consisting of edges and unidentified fragments of almost organic memory. The purpose of Miotto’s artworks is to alter memories; she is particularly interested in the concept of the metamorphosis of identity - of changing from one state to another. Mental states and memories re-emerge, evolving from the state of passivity to a state of malignant depravity through trauma and injury and manifest themselves in a cathartic process, in the form of scars and malformations. The layering and stratification of various materials, which we see in the presented artwork entitled Feticcio - an installation piece made of wood and latex - adds to the cathartic cycle of overwriting, erasing the previously left tracks, instead, overlapping the new ones, engaged in the infinite cycle of accumulation. It is an act of extreme violence aimed at searching for balance; it is an echo, a void left where once resided something that is now transformed and distorted. Time is fluid, and sooner or later, everything resurfaces and is crushed by the stratifications and lacerations. Ilaria’s aim isn’t to portray the reality as a solid entity but to instead portray it as a fleeting, fragile concept, underlining that we all have a different reality, and the same events affect us in diverse ways, their legacy permanently imprinted in our psyche. The artist prints these realities onto latex, and if we go back to the definition of the verb to print (to produce (books, newspapers, magazines, etc.), especially in large quantities, by a mechanical process involving the transfer of text, images, or designs to paper), we shall realise that it is precisely what Miotto is doing symbolically: applying pressure and leaving traces of that pressure. The world is disturbed and has always been; it intervenes with us perpetually and continuously, sometimes distorting us to the point where it becomes impossible to comprehend and recognise even ourselves; for me, Feticcio is a reminder of that. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 Feticcio 2021 Installation: latex and wood 70 x 90 x 50 cm

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ARTIST N°67

FROM ITALY

MIRATA NOEMI

148

Noemi Mirata was born in Catania in 1995. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania, address Painting, he moved to Milan to attend the two years at the Academy of Fine Arti di Brera, specialization in Theory and Practice of Artistic Therapeutics. In 2019 she was selected from Collettivo Flock to take part in the PUPI project - The new story, giving it the opportunity to deepen a new symbiosis between tradition and the contemporary world. In January of the same year he participated in the Macro Asilo in Rome with a performance Pro-Memoria, curated by Nicoletta Braga. From 2019 to January 2020 she carried out a workshop with abused women in the Cerchi d’Acqua (MI) anti-violence center. In July 2020 he led a workshop at the DENDRON Space (CT) creating a site specific work. In the same year she carried out an internship for Alain Urrutia Studio (Berlin), giving her the opportunity to broaden her knowledge and share her research with the artist. During the same year she was selected by MUSPA by creating a personal exhibition through the platform. He currently collaborates with CELL online art project. His research focuses on the concept of nature seen as the place from which everything originates and to which everything come back. Nature is Mother but at the same time it is a devouring force in continuous transformation. The themes of resilience and intimacy are part of his artistic project, the use of elements purely natural underlines this almost exasperated search for a lost or forgotten place. He currently lives and works in Milan.

The fascinating Salicornia is an ancient plant belonging to the Amaranthaceae family, it can grow in arid and even desert environments. Considered a resilient plant, it changes and evolves to adapt to its surroundings. Inside the disused space, emblem of the artifice, the group of plants proudly ascends towering over the space. The iconographic style of the work tends to hold this plant of great importance. In a moment of pandemic like ours, nature makes us see the possibility of imitating it, imitating its ability to adapt to a reluctant context.

1 Resistenza 2021 Salicornia, interventi olio su tela stampata 96 x 145 cm

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ARTIST N°68

FROM ITALY

MONTI BENEDETTA

150

Benedetta Monti is an Italian artist who lives and works in Rome. She holds a BA in Fine Art from the Urbino Academy of Fine Arts and a degree in Marketing and Management from Napier, Milano, with a thesis on mockumentary. Monti started to draw from an early age; her most concrete approach to art and painting dates back to 2016, which began her artistic research. Over the years, she has experimented with different modes of expression – from performance to installation and video art – to return to pictorial practise eventually. Benedetta is interested in body language, the psychology of the masses and sales, which led her to reflect extensively on the fickleness of thought and the critical capacity of people, with a focus on the art world: “How many times does a seller change history of the product according to the type of buyer he has in front of him? How many times a critic changes the meaning of a work to make it more attractive?” - the trust given to narratives is often fictitious. Se ti Chini Forse mi Vedrai is the legacy of a suggestion that she had developed in 2017 after looking at the etchings of Max Klinger in the series called The Glove - dream-like and symbolic: “I tried to investigate, through a different medium, a painting, the many different allusions of meaning, which have led Max Klinger up to the dadaists and artists of today; for my contemporaries to fall in love with the glove as a symbol that shows different evocations”. After years of experimentation, the artist’s attention turned to unusual details such as the mischievous profile, a shadow without clear boundaries or the carapace. The glove element is linked to different and opposite symbologies – in the past related to the identification of social class or amorous rituals, while in contemporary times, it refers more to the dimension of domestic and gender stereotypes. “Glove is a plastic sign, open to the personal interpretation of a form, discounting it from its original combination with the glove as the object. The floor creates a surreal and suspended perspective; the human figure is not contemplated and almost does not seem necessary, although the object may make us wonder if something has just happened, or it happened a long time ago or will happen in the future. Despite the range of action the trajectories of the floor want to expand, they collide with the limit of the canvas, filling the atmosphere that surrounds the viewer.” — Text by Laura Pieri

1 Se ti chini forse mi vedrai 2020 Acrylic paint on canvas 120 x 100 cm 1

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ARTIST N°69

FROM ITALY

152

MONZALI ERICA

Erica Monzali (b. 1993) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Milan. She holds a BA in Fine Art (Printmaking) from the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts and an MA in Fine Art (Painting and Visual Arts). Monzali is currently studying for her second MA in Art Direction and Copywriting at the Poli Design in Milan. Pursuing her strong interest in various artistic disciplines, especially printmaking, Erica completed two internships to enhance her knowledge of the medium: at Checkpoint Charly atelier in Bologna, followed by one at an art publishing house called Three Star Books in Paris. The artist’s visual research is mainly focused on abstract aesthetics; she works with a vast range of imagery, creating patterns and textures. Monzali works with various techniques, focusing on visual and tactile aspects of colours, forms and materials. She is interested in the concept of repetition - a distinctive characteristic of the printmaking discipline. In Erica’s artworks, however, the reiteration is considered the approach to technical reproduction and a method of creation, causing it to develop into a dialogue with different variables that become continuously modified, altering the final result. The large work presented at the Fair entitled Untitled. Trame - Gotico 1 - is created using the frottage technique on a hand-carved linoleum plate, working with wax pastels on Wenzhou paper. This work, in particular, illustrates perfectly the concept of repetitiveness - the materials and the way they are used are engaged in the organic dialogue: the gestural application of rubbing the wax pastel and the plate with the manual creation of the frottage. This artwork is part of a larger body of work entitled Untitled - Trama. The pieces compare the concept of seriality of the printing matrix and the imperfection and randomness that the manual action brings to the process. The repetition of the same pattern on the surface - the movement from the rubbing of the wax crayon - creates a complex texture whose uniformity - generated by a semi-mechanical gesture, is repetitive and not particularly creative. However, it is strongly linked to the aesthetic choice governed by the eye and the mind. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

REA ART FAIR! 2021

1 Untitled. Trame - Gotico 1 2021 Frottage on a hand-carved linoleum plate, wax pastels on Wenzhou paper 184 x 131 cm

153

ARTIST N°70

FROM ITALY

MUSSI FRANCESCA

154

Francesca Mussi (1992) is a visual artist based in Milan. She studied Visual Arts at Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and Design at the University of Leeds. In 2015 she founded the cultural association Landskap in Milan, in 2016 and in 2018 she collaborated for the international art residency PASSAGE in Bergerac. She is the co-founder of the art collective Bidet à Boire since 2020. The artist started her production with different traditional and experimental printmaking techniques on paper but more recently she works with installations in an heterogeneous language. Francesca Mussi’s work is often born from actions recorded privately, conceived as the translation of an intimate dimension and brought into a universal common sphere. The action is a sort of generative matrix that remains as the base of the following multiples. Even the object production, sculptural production, is conceived as a print of a former action. She uses myths and micro-tales of the place she exhibits in to establish contemporary observations, building sometimes a direct dialogue with the place in which the works are being shown. The work Ses flancs de bois is part of Never seen performances, a series of images that come from a hidden action, as the artist recorded a performance secretly in a contemporary art museum. The video was never made public, but its testimonies are visible through a series of different images. The action consisted on stripping layers of tissue-paper the artist had previously used to cover the entire surface of a sofa in the museum space. She then reduces the tissue-paper into little crumbled balls, throwing them on the floor. The piece is a reflection on the relationship that the emerging artist has with the institution. Never seen performance is composed out of images deriving from this past action, printed on different surfaces and objects, all related to the artist’s personal tools and imaginary, like her former working desk, studio drawers etc.

1 Ses flancs de bois 2021 Silkscreen on wood 103 x 67 cm

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ARTIST N°71

FROM ITALY

NARDULLI DOMINGO

156

Domenico Nardulli (b. 1983) is an Italian photographer who lives and works in Milan. In 2011 he completed a degree in photography at the Apab in Florence and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in public relations communication at the Iulm University of Milan. Founder of doubleone_studio, Nardulli’s artistic production is divided between fashion photography and realistic photography. His works have recently been published for Vogue Italia and I-D Italia. Domenico was selected with the project Spazio Libero, winner of the REFOCUS call promoted by MIBACT in collaboration with MUFOCO and TRIENNALE Milano. The exhibition will be held in 2021. His photographs are distinguished by a realistic approach and, at the same time, with an ironic intention in placing and selecting objects and everyday situations usually unnoticed within the lens. For the artist, the photographic composition needs the union of all the indispensable elements: technique and subject are not enough for optimal communicative success, to be able to give emotional value to photography, according to him, one must put the intention and the message, albeit subtle, before centring the objective. This does not mean that technique, method, and irony cannot coexist. His photos are a natural blend of documentary and emotional photography. The spirit that distinguishes Nardulli is of nostalgic carefreeness, who in an interview declares: “We must remove from us all the conventions, the superstructures that surround us and rediscover ourselves authentic and without masks. Return children with an awareness of soul and spirit. Don’t take yourself too seriously.” His challenge lies precisely in revealing an image for what it is, moving it from its initial concept and loading it with new meaning. A photograph that could be considered a random error becomes restitution of purpose, an ironic but punctual communication of the reality in which we live. Timeless was taken in Snæfellsnes, on the north coast of Iceland, during one of the many trips to the north that Domenico loves to take. A simple moment of daily life and the portrait of an individual with whom we can all relate seems to be completely comfortable in the grandeur of the natural landscape surrounding him. A seemingly dull moment that is warmed by the bright and intense colours of photography. Everything seems wonderfully calm and serene: a window into daily life, where the house, the car, the lamp in the road, the mountains behind, give a sense of place and non-place, in which we can recognize all the common-places of a possible city. A stop in time that allows us to acknowledge something already seen and already known in that man who sweeps the driveway. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1 Timeless 2018 Digital photography taken with Fujifilm XT2, 35mm f/2 lens 50 x 70 cm

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ARTIST N°72

FROM ITALY

NUVOLA CAMERA

158

Nuvola Camera (1998, Como) lives and works in Milan and she is currently attending the course of Painting and Visual art at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti. In her pictorial research the subjects are always recognisable but the atmosphere that surrounds them is rarefied, the depicted forms become part of another, abstract dimension. The reduction of forms is not to take away their reality and concreteness, but rather to give a new space to the represented subject, opening it up to unexplored possibilities without forcing it into a closed and finite dimension. Be it landscapes, interiors or still life, Nuvola Camera’s subjects, while always maintaining a strong link with reality and remaining recognizable, are transformed in form and colour. The artist is approaching a more abstract, contemplative, metaphysical dimension that belongs to painting alone. In practical terms, what takes place is perhaps a reduction of the subject to its minimum terms. Nuvola Camera is interested in ropography, that is, depicting those things that lack importance, trivial objects, small wares, things that are not always what they seem, the first appearance may deceive. Her attentive eye on simple every-day things, rather unusually transforms the subjects afterwards through brushstrokes on canvas, shedding new light onto them. The painter is not letting anything slip, she carefully observes all life and still life around her, in her studio environment and her daily surroundings, a tactile luminous dimension.

1 Interruttore Oil on canvas 2020 35 x 25 cm

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ARTIST N°73

FROM ITALY

PACE ARIANNA

160

Arianna Pace (b. 1995) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Pesaro. She holds an MA in Fine Art (Painting) from the Urbino Academy of Fine Arts. In 2020 Pace joined the artist Giulia Cenci as an assistant and exhibited her works at Spazio In Situ In Rome and Casa Sponge a Mezzanotte in Pergola (PU). She has also taken part in the “Premio Nazionale Delle Arti” (PNA) of the Accademia di Belle Arti Torino, in group exhibitions at PXL Mad faculty, Hasselt, Belgium; Galleria in Paradiso, Giardini della Biennale, Venice; BIGAM (Biennale giovani artisti), Macerata; and Museo tattile Omero in Ancona. The obvious and necessary correlation between landscape, nature and anthropological society is the core of Arianna’s discourse, who has always studied the places where she was born, not only through long walks but mainly through collecting information and details using photographic medium and casting. The material then becomes a study plan to open scientific arguments and questions. Almost like a geologist, she studies the different microorganisms that make up a circumscribed landscape and the slow processes of modification that this context undergoes over time through human action. Karren is the name that defines the forms of deterioration of the rock by meteoric waters and chemical, biological agents. Karren is born from the analysis of one of these chemical processes recreated here specifically to show the public the erosion of organic material, in this case, clay. The artwork is an asset to be protected as a non-renewable resource nowadays studied and surveyed as components of the natural landscape to be safeguarded. The installation, therefore, seeks to raise the viewer’s awareness of the subject by paying attention to the geological heritage and its essential protection and enhancement. The activity of corrosion is, most of the time, triggered and accelerated by the action of man in the anthropocentric era, and the installation becomes a metaphor of this dialectical component of human nature that at the same time implements a strategy of safeguarding the landscape without stopping its action of undoing. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1-2 Karren#1 2020 Separating funnel, acetic acid, clay, iron, wood, acetate printing 90 x 63 x 118.5 cm

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ARTIST N°74

FROM ITALY

PACUCCI SARA

162

Sara Pacucci (Treviso 1999) graduated in 2018 in plastic disciplines sculptural and graphic pictorial, current-mind studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in Luca Reffo’s Atelier 12. Collisions and encounters. Looking out into the world, I would like to get lost in the infinite delicacy of visual systems that sometimes recognize- without knowing, an intimate and subtle sensitive interaction between multiple worlds that manifest themselves in whispers. Looking for contact points, sometimes, by magic, we see and immerse ourselves in an invisible network. My research aims to investigate the real, starting from the idea of the Points of Con-Tact; give it the theory created between several bodies, public participation, an attempt to break I-world dualism. All things seem to reconnect with each other, silent dialogues, they “touch”, almost in secret. An infinite grid is being drawn, a map, where the elements come alive with each other. In my work, I always look for a delicate story; I want images to establish themselves in the beholder’s mind, making others emerge, a reminder of our experience, memories, the clear indefiniteness of dreams. Blurred boundaries to seek a grand vision of the whole: everything is reconnected, everything tells us. My goal is to open a glance searching for links; I restarted from the concrete tactility, investigating the gesture, then opening the way to broader visions; so came images of landscapes, signs, natural elements, bodies. In my operating method, words also had a particular weight: their resonance in mind often has the power to reunite with the imagination and unlock it; thought is always imaginal, and through painting, it can approach the visual manifestation. My artwork has developed thanks to these suggestions; the technique can vary from subject to subject, tailored to the exact needs, from a more material painting to thin and precise layers. A dialectical juxtaposition to search for links. Two surfaces that let transpire king. Two sensitive paths that refer to each other. An overview. Always of everything is connected, everything. He tells us. — Text by Pelin Zeytinci

1a-1b Interconnections 2021 Oil on canvas Diptych, 40 x 30 cm each

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ARTIST N°75

FROM KOREA

PARK CHANBYUL

164

The shapes vary and it never repeats itself because of the many natural phenomena that take place.

Chanbyul Park (b. 1994) is a South Korean artist who lives and works in Eindhoven. She holds a degree in Industrial Design from Ewha Womans University in Seoul and is currently studying for a degree in Contextual Design at the Eindhoven Design Academy. Chanbyul is an artist-designer who develops her perspective on the world through research of objects and the rules of nature to understand what surrounds us and develop better awareness. Her source of inspiration is the Impressionists and Cubists whose modes of reading the world she studies, establishing her contemporary interpretation: “I paint, create objects and draw visual novels to express my ideas. I believe that understanding this world we live in leads to a better understanding of ourselves.” Park’s research aims to record the order of the world in her works, paying particular attention to the theme of time that has an invisible character but that at the same time is perceived by humanity. Impressionism Object is the name given to the entire series in which she uses candles as a material to record time – the title refers to the Impressionist approach with particular attention paid to the passage of time. Nature of Time is part of this vast series, composed of drawings, sculptures and design objects: “This painting is a trace drawn by drops of a candle. The shape varies and never repeats itself because of many natural phenomena such as the time it takes the wax to flow and solidify or the direction in which the wind blows, the position, the temperature and the humidity”. This work is the visual documentation of the natural order of nine loose candles deeply influenced by external conditions and time. — Text by Laura Pieri

1 Nature of time 2021 Candle wax on watercolour paper 76 x 56 cm 1

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ARTIST N°76

FROM ITALY

PASSANTINO PAOLA

166

She was born in Palermo in 1995. She graduated in painting in 2018 and always specializes in painting, graduating with honours from the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo in 2020. She is followed by teachers Fulvio Di Piazza, Francesco De Grandi, Alessandro Bazan, Pierantonio Romanelli. Currently teaches art and image in middle school in the province of Forlì Cesena. Passantino’s painting starts from a study on whites and snow. It then moves towards the concepts of space, full and empty, whose emptiness is not intended as the absence of something but is an integral part of the vision of the work as a whole. Her works result from a violent process where the starting image from which he draws inspiration is destroyed or mutilated, replaced by new identities and new forms. The work proposed for ReA! Art Fair is an oil painting from 2020 and measures 70 x 100 cm. Together with the latest artworks, this work wants to create bewilderment in the viewer’s vision, who may believe that he is in front of different mediums, while the only one used is that of oil colour. — Text by Pelin Zeytinci

1 2020 Oil on canvas 70 x 100 cm 1

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ARTIST N°77

FROM ITALY

PAVAN PAOLO

168

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169

Paolo Pavan (b. 1987) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Nerbon. He holds a BA in Fine Art (Painting) and an MA in Decoration from the Venice Academy of Fine Arts. During his study years, Pavan exhibited in multiple places between Venice and Treviso, including the Cittadell’arte gallery in Venice (2017), Villa Orsini in Scorzè di Venezia (2015) and the Museum of Santa Caterina in Treviso (2015). Most recently, he was a finalist of the Combat 2018 prize with the group exhibition at the G. Fattori Museum in Livorno; in the same year, he exhibited at the Atelier 3 + 10 in Venice, while in 2021, he was a finalist of their Winter Prize. Paolo has always identified as a painter, but during his journey, he went through various phases of experimentation in which, however, his work is characterized by a robust colour scheme in which the detail is almost always lost in the blur. His works during the academic period were large canvases, where he used bright and liquid colours, which allowed him to experiment more with light and space. Currently, we find the same technique in the artist’s paintings, which differs from the previous one in terms of subjects and the use of colour, which now seems to have disappeared from his interest. He is attracted not as much by the technical possibilities of the canvas but by the subject that takes shape on it. Through photos taken at an amateur’s level, personal archives and complete books, Pavan sources images and narratives that create an imaginary visual diary composed from his history and experience. L’amore ci farà a pezzi borrows a detail from a Flemish painting representing a typical hunting scene. He captures one point above all: a white greyhound trying to get the better of a wolf. Paolo decided to pay homage to this animal and his effort by making it the scene’s protagonist with a pictorial gesture. Through enlarging and proportioning the original image, he comes into direct contact and has a more intimate relationship with the subject that interests him. This detail is lost on the canvas, through the printing of the colour and in the glazing, which the artist himself defines as a means to read reality and create something realistic and predictable, which turns out to be the visual reconstruction of what he has experienced in an emotional sense. The play of greys, rather than black and white, helps him be abstract and further detach the image from its original to make it his own and distance it from reality. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1 L’amore ci farà a pezzi 2019 Oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm

ARTIST N°78

FROM ITALY

170

PIGNOTTI GIADA

Giada Pignotti (b. 1992) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Milan. She holds an MA in Fine Art (Painting and Visual Arts) from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Pignotti recently had her first solo show at Nowhere Gallery in Milan. Previously she participated in the “Helicotrema - Recorded Audio Festival” (2020), “Latibule”, Walkin’ Studio festival at Matteo Cremonesi’s studio, Milan (2019) and “The Wolf Used to Bark Every Night”, a group exhibition curated by Ambra Castagnetti in Genoa (2018). Ever since a young age, Pignotti perceived drawings as her method of expressing the most intimate side of her personality. For her, drawing is something extraordinarily physical and performative that brings along healing and revitalization. In 2016 Giada found some of her old drawings in the family archive, which made her understand specific mechanisms that are repeated in her way of processing: the graphic is not only a tool of analysis, but it is also a strategy to narrate and act out, tell stories that are a continuous exchange between the image and the narrative. Her artistic practice feels the influence of this relationship that takes shape through voice, recording and narration, sometimes in combination with free drawing, almost always done quickly, on torn sheets of paper. To analyze the most performative components of the drawing, the voice is placed as the negative image, capable of oscillating and communicating along with it while retaining sensorial independence. Thus “MONDIBUI” - a sound project structured in episodes was born, divided, in turn, into two different narrative strands (“1. Adam, Rosemary and the Enchanted World” and “2. La Cantante”), still open to this day. The visual work present at the fair, on the other hand, deviates from this research to bring to light the artist’s childhood images through a series of four drawings. The hidden protagonist of these sketches is the water, transparent or cloudy, which intrinsically hides the feeling of relief that she sees in the bathroom, a sensation of discovery and danger. The image created is that of a pond. Seeing your fingertips wrinkle, being in contact with different microorganisms, drawing in the water, discovering submerged worlds and feeling your own suspended body are suggestions for Pignotti to think about the state of body matter and the mysterious relationship between body and pleasure. Still, water is suspended in time in which she takes the time to wait out whether something fascinating will sooner or later emerge. The creatures that wait with her just below the water level will probably continue to change shape, and for this reason, they will never be able to be captured, just as water can never be one form but at the same time will adopt all the forms. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1-2-3-4 Mystic Swamp (Questa palude è un tempo di mezzo) 2020-21 Series of 4 drawings Mixed media on paper Variable dimensions

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ARTIST N°79

PILUSI ALICE

FROM ITALY

172

Alice Pilusi (b. 1997) is an Italian artist who lives and works between Milan and Pescara. She holds a BA in Fine Art from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and has also received training at the L’Aquila Academy of Fine Arts. In recent years Pilusi has participated in the NOCCIOLINE #8 (2020) exhibition, a project promoted by Yellow (VA), curated by Davide Serpetti, Tortoreto; Straperetana - Produttori di Silenzio (2020) brainchild of Paola Capata and Delfo Durante, curated by Saverio Verini in collaboration with Matteo Fato, Pereto (AQ); Overlap (2019), curated by Andrea Croce and Michela Murialdo, National Gallery of Cosenza. Pilusi’s work moves in and out of contemporary reality by constructing an imaginary world characterized by hyper-luminous, artificial and grotesque visions. In this world, we recognize visual elements that belong to us in everyday life and find alienating details that interfere with the purity of materials, shapes, and colours. Alice wants to bring to light the sinister side of childhood in the digital age. Her installations focus the viewer’s attention on the darkest shades of a value system that fetishizes youth, beauty, and innocence. The imaginative pool from which the artist draws inspiration is undoubtedly derived from the contemporary beauty industry, cake design tutorials and glossy packaging. The materials she uses result from an investigation in this environment that represents an unsatisfied desire to go back to her inner child. One of the first works reflecting this research is Beauty Guru, a performance in which Pilusi puts the nail polish on a girl for a very extended period in which the simple gesture of applying the nail polish turns into a mantra, a ritual that, in its final result manages to ironize and mock the construction of image and beauty within the macrocosm of the internet. After this experience, digital work was born: focusing on the digital beauty filters used in social media to open a critical investigation on the self-celebration of one’s image on the web. The work Ma$K is one of Alise’s latest passages on the subject of female aesthetics on the web and how the idea of women is stereotyped through concepts of sweetness, softness and sensuality. The work takes the form of a cotton beauty mask, trendy at the moment, and makes it a tribal object with characteristics almost from a primitive geological find. By inserting the mask between these two opposite poles, the artist leverages on the cult of today’s identity, on the perception of beauty and at the same time on the social and cultural appropriation of globalization, thus speaking of a possible inheritance that today’s homologated society could leave to future generations. — Text by Milena Zanetti

REA ART FAIR! 2021

1 Ma$K 2020 Glazed ceramics 17 x 21 x 0,6 cm

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ARTIST N°80

PIRAS YARNO

FROM ITALY

174

Yarno Piras (1997, Turin) has studied Visual Cultures at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera. His works seem to have a direct link with the past. It is the material that suggests the possibilities of transformation and manipulation for the research of the final form; a simple amplification of the primary. This approach becomes concrete with the series of works Grand Bois: the subject is the object in its singular and individual form. The reflection on the attention to containment leads to the concretisation of the intimate dimension through the realisation of the series Petit Bois. The relationship, at first beginning with the self, subsequently extends to the social context, feeding questions about the role of the artist, the value of technique and work; thus was born the series of works Lavoro Forzato. A matter of solids and voids. The seat is born from contrasting forces, a balanced tension of a downward thrust and a resistance that pushes upward. Just as the act of inflating is born from an attempt to alter a contrast by forcing the introduction of air through the use of energy. Sitting implies an effort, not so much in letting oneself fall, but in moving and looking for the space you want to occupy. An effort, a force exerted for a displacement, finds its definition in the work, where its resultant becomes a displacement, a change both physical and of the sense of emptiness and fullness. It is the work that certifies and declares fullness. The work Forced Work N.03 is a chair from which the backrest and the top of the seat have been removed and covered on all its surface by air chambers. The chambers intertwine and thanks to the tension that they create, they reconstruct that balancing relationship that allows for one to sit. The chair is connected to four bicycle pumps. To sit is to fill a space or to be filled by the space?

1 Lavoro Forzato N. 03 2019 Aluminium, air chambers + n. 4 pumps Variable dimensions

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CATALOGUE

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We are working towards creating a more intimate communication between the society and the emerging artists, as well as the curators.

4/5

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ARTIST N°81

FROM ITALY

POLLONI FEDERICO

178

Federico Polloni (b. 1991) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Venice. He holds an MA in Fine Art (Painting) from the Venice Academy of Fine Arts. Polloni exhibited in various cities, including New York, London, Bergen, Milan and Ljubljana. Among the most recent exhibitions is the Wopart fair in Switzerland, The Collective Upgrade at the Dimora Artica Gallery in Milan and Unlikely at Palazzo Mocenigo Venice. In 2020 he founded the Cultural Association Acromo in Venice; in the same year, he opened the first Lab space shared with Casablanca_studio_ in the same city. In 2021 Federico collaborated in realising the first independent festival and open studio of young emerging artists operating in Venice (Venice Independent Art Scene). His pictorial universe has a circular dimension and time, in which the horizon is always elsewhere. Immediately perceptible is the will to go outside the preestablished visual places to arrive at a personal deconstruction of space. Starting from figurative elements of reality, the artist creates environments with colours and digital forms. His is a primitive imaginary that oscillates between the artificial and the dreamlike, where figurative elements are placed beyond space and time. The intelligibility of Polloni’s works manifests itself gradually, after a careful observation of every little detail. What he wants to do, is to invite the gaze of the observer to get lost to be able to eviscerate the visual patterns that characterise the details. Federico’s paintings dialogue with each other, generating a constant connection between past and present and creating a recognisable stylistic figure that unites them all. In each work, there is always an element that suggests what will come next, establishing in this way a narrative anthology that becomes a key to reading for all its production. The critical aspect of all his poetics remains the constant tension between interiority and the sensitive world, between what is in us and what we draw from the outside, making it our own. In Ragenbogen and Ortensie, the artist digs into his inner self, making materialise sensations, memories and obsessions, which then declines into objects suspended in metaphysical spaces, manifesting a tension towards the unknown. — Federico Polloni

1 Ragenbogen 2021 Acrylic paint on paper 50 x 30 cm

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ARTIST N°82

FROM ITALY

POZZATO FRANCESCO

180

Francesco Pozzato lives and works between Venice and Vicenza. He completed his studies first in Theater and then in Visual Arts at the IUAV University of Venice and is currently enrolled in Ancient and Medieval Mediterranean History at the Ca ‘Foscari University. In 2020 he participated in the Galleria Continua and the Elpis Una Foundation project Boccata d’Arte in Sepino (Campobasso), in 2019 he was in residence at BoCs Art (Cosenza) and in 2018 at the ateliers of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation (Venice). He has recently participated in various exhibitions, including Metafotografia, curated by Mauro Zanchi and Sara Benaglia, BACO Contemporary Art Base Today (Bergamo, 2020), Photo Open Up - Argo, curated by Carlo Sala at the Cathedral Ex Macello (Padua, 2019), Coming Soon, curated by Mira Asriningtyas, Nora Heidorn and Kari Rittenbach at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation (Turin, 2018), and the solo show In this sign, you shall lose, curated by Saverio Bonato (Schio, 2019). Also in 2018 he took part in the Q-Rated workshop with Zach Blas, Rana Hamadeh and Robert Leckie, curated by La Quadriennale di Roma near Lecce. His work focuses on the analysis of the relationship between matter and history, between three-dimensionality and temporality, in particular on the relationship between raw materials and the historical interval which is defined as Ancient. According to the artist, in fact, the the past of mankind has had a preponderant influence on the present of contemporary man. Society, especially Western, appears completely changed, especially in the last few centuries, and it is precisely on this discrepancy that Pozzato’s artistic research focuses on: he investigates how Ancient, apparently disappeared, dialogue with contemporaneity and vice versa.

Earthquake baroque (al-Hassan mosque) 50 x 70 cm

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181

ARTIST N°83

FROM ITALY

RAMUNNO MARIKA

182

Marika Ramunno (1991) born in Puglia. After the degree in communication science at University of Bari with a thesis on the relationship between Cinema and Photography, she decided to spend time in UK. Back in Italy, during the two.year specialization at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, she participated in the Erasmus program in Estonia. Since 2017 she has been working as a freelance photographer and videomaker for communication agencies, events and companies, also making music videoclip. In 2019 she worked with Canon Europa for the Matera European Photography project, making interviews and final editing of a short-doc. She is currently attending a new study programme in Video Designer at Apulia Digital Maker (ITS). She is the founder of the photography magazine “Ombra Magazine“ and “A Necessary Choice“ is her first documentary. The photographic project “Relationship” investigates the evocative power nature asserts on mankind, drawing on their innermost and ancestral soul, which humans themselves translate into impressions: strokes of light and colour. Here is especially analyzed the relationship between human and horse: a real meeting of souls, which presumes mutual trust and respect, returned through a game of looks and hands. The shots represent metaphors for a renewed golden age, in which happiness is the skin-to-skin connection between man and horse, knight and steed, biped and quadruped. Emotions are overwhelming but fleeting, feelings are slow to arise but lasting. The photographic journey I propose attempts to explore a deep and passionate emotional dimension. These pictures come from my personal relation with the world of horse riding. I spent a lot of time with them in my childhood. So I decided to get involved in this kind of relationship with my camera: a relationship that became strong through a code made by gesture, voice and gaze. It becomes a connection between human beings and nature, made by respect and faith.

1-2-3 Relationship I-II-III 2020 Photography Variable dimensions

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ARTIST N°84

FROM PORTUGAL

RAPOSO PIRES RAFAEL

184

Being influenced by his parents from a young age to observe and create thoughts on architecture and urbanism, he uses photography to communicate my artistic concepts. His body of work consists mainly of photographs produced while practising dérives made in diverse urban areas. He has started his projects supported by the interest in how transformative architecture can be, observing improvised elements that made him aware of the distancing between planning and how different people use a constructed space. Reflecting on how the implemented solutions impact and influence the living experience of its inhabitants. There is more to Urban Limits than a Circular Road (2021). ‘There is more to Urban Limits than a Circular Road’ is a photographic essay of numerous dérives made around urban areas in the Umbrian region of Italy. While walking towards the outer areas of a city, I am being guided by what my senses recognised as the limits of an urban area. Main infrastructures such as larger roads, railroads and railway stations, dormitory blocks, industries, or even sport centres and urban parks are what primarily bind my areas of interest. From an improvised solution at a tennis court to the child’s swing overlooking the cable car line, passing by the saddening truth of suburbialooking cemetery houses, to the open stairs leading inside a private apartment block, all these peculiar situations convey a certain humour and irony to me. Borderline urban areas can often feel as monotonous as circular roads since they are used chiefly as rapid pass-through places. But when they are observed at a walking pace, several elements turn visible, displaying a rich amount of functions, materialities, shapes and presence. That multiplicity in the features found here convey to me a sentiment of urban limits. — Text by Pelin Zeytinci

Minimetrò (Bystanders) Inkjet print on fine-art cotton paper edition of 3+1 a.p. 100 x 66 cm

Support II Inkjet print on fine-art cotton paper edition of 3+1 a.p. 40 x 60 cm

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ARTIST N°85

FROM ITALY

REGUZZONI EVA

186

Eva Reguzzoni (b. 1965) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Borgo Ticino. Restorer and designer archaeologist by profession, she attended the school of industrial Applied Art of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. In 2020 the artist’s monograph Eva Reguzzoni - a un PASSO was published with texts by Irene Biolchini and Rossella Moratto for the series PageNotFound-Editore vanillaedizioni. Since 2009 she has developed personal artistic research investigating the instability of moods: unconscious thoughts generated by trauma create disturbances that cause fragments of memories and unconscious thoughts. Intensely intimate, Eva’s works are born from suggestions taken from moments of life, moments that, lived through sensory experience, are imprinted in memory as precious memories. Rupture, fragmentation and transformation are constant themes in her research, an obsessive but liberating mental investigation that leads to an unconscious selfanalysis. Constantly influenced by her profession as a restorer and archaeological designer, the continuous contact with the past contaminated Reguzzoni’s artistic process and generated valid stimuli to develop a personal language. In her works, there is a constant presence of natural elements taken from everyday life such as leaves, stones and woods or others, which in their fragility and fragmentation suggest creative dynamics that are always revealed during the making. The installation is the art form that she prefers because it allows her to amplify the dialogue between the works, objects, and space; the titles are often indicative of her research work and voluntarily suggest reading keys, helpful to understand the creative processes that generated the artwork. Combining forms to compensate for memories perfectly describes the creative process that turns into an objective rite of remembrance—through an ordered and classifying sequence of still lifes, the composition objects take on unexpected aspects, becoming found in the archive of the present. It is a creative process of construction on a white surface to be invaded with fragile and straightforward objects, a work that has generated a solid call to nature and, at the same time, looks like a fossil of memory that can be traced back to other recalls. — Text by Laura Pieri

1 Unisco le forme per compensare i ricordi 2021 Mixed media installation 82 x 180 x 40 cm

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ARTIST N°86

FROM ITALY

RESSETTA CHIARA

188

Chiara Ressetta (b. 1996) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Turin. She holds an MA in Fine Arts from the Florence Academy of Fine Arts and is currently finishing a painting course at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts. At the moment, Ressetta works mainly in the pictorial medium, which over the last two years has helped her to develop a specific image-based practice. Specifically, she is interested in subjects that may represent the iconic aspects of modern society, while to others, they can be considered of total disinterest or at least of daily interest but often not evaluated as meaningful. These facts, subjects and phenomena are certainly part of Chiara’s experiences, where subjects are linked to her usual visual world; more in-depth research takes place within photographic shots and archival books. To give an example, the washing, which is the act of purification through the bath and immersion in water, is a theme that she addresses promptly within her paintings, images and collages of people taking baths in the fountains and public. Caco in Pineta - the spontaneous and animal act of a person who releases their physical needs outdoors, in a natural situation, is the theme addressed in the painting Le Forme Della Memoria (Caco in Pineta). In the artwork, we find a not immediately recognizable, crouching human figure under the palm leaves. Le Forme Della Memoria results from a photographic project born between 2019 and 2021 from discovering a war book that documented the effects of dysentery during the I World War through an extensive photographic archive. The instinctual and wild aspect of this action gradually became of interest; the artist then began to notice this phenomenon was less unusual than she thought—an act of a certain vulgarity which, however, always retains a certain irony and naivety. She tries to refine this gesture to bring it back into the familiar collective environment. The project aims to bring to light a reworking of collective memory through moments of personal memory. The importance of indifference that certain phenomena considered common can reflect a different type of value when a subject is activated in the pictorial scene. At an early stage of her work, Ressetta breaks down and composes, through collage, the photographic image, then moves on to the canvas on which she uses different materials. The canvas is never covered in the initial phase; she instead uses natural colours to make her protagonists interact. Pure oil colours, oil pastels and acrylic, are the materials that Chiara uses with straightforward gestures. In work presented at the Fair, you can also see details in coloured pencils. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1 Le forme della memoria (caco in pineta) 2021 Mixed media on canvas 160 x 140 cm

REA ART FAIR! 2021

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ARTIST N°87

FROM ITALY

RINALDI ELEONORA

190

Eleonora Rinaldi (1994, Udine) has attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where she graduated in Painting in 2020. Rinaldi is currently attending the two-year course of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, at the atelier of Professor Di Raco. She takes part in several group exhibitions in 2020, including Combat Prize (Livorno) as a finalist in the Painting section, The Life of Art (Milan) curated by A60 Contemporary Art Space Gallery, The Ark of Noah (Milan) curated by Ex Fabbrica delle Bambole and ArtParmaFair (Parma). Intrigued by the tension between forms that inhabit a shared pictorial surface, Eleonora Rinaldi composes environments that require for at-timesunrelated elements to engage in a dialogue. The outcome differs each time, in consonance with the viewer’s gaze and perception of the painterly subjects as Rinaldi pursues an unrestricted, ambiguous visual field. Seeking entryways to different possible dimensions, the artist experiments with the representation of material objects and living organisms in relation to one another, questioning the ways in which at any given point the instinctive or determined artistic choice might give way to shifting definitions and changing dynamics of the painted scenes. There is an external source of light in La Ciotola D’Oro (2021), shining on animal fur in what seems like an otherworldly, nocturnal setting. A second, internal source is a golden bowl that seems like no ordinary object but it appears to be bizarrely illuminating the space around it. Rinaldi partially illustrates the animal’s body in the enigmatic scene, rendering the spectator unsure of whether the creature is aware of the radiant item next to it, our vision restricted by the physical borders of the canvas. The viewer is met with the dilemma of attributing this happening to the sphere of the natural, to symbolism, to the fictitious or to the supernatural.

1 La ciotola d’oro 2021 Oil on canvas 140 x 120 cm

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ARTIST N°88

FROM CANADA

RUOFF AIMEE

192

Aimee Ruoff (b. 1997) is a Canadian artist born who lives and works in Toronto. She holds a BA in Fine Art from the University of Guelph and now makes oil paintings, drawings and prints from her home studio, recently venturing into handpainted animation. Ruoff has participated in group exhibitions, fairs and publications, both locally and internationally, and between 2018 and 2019, she won the Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation and Junior Juried Art Show awards. In her practice, she combines classical painting techniques with a reflection on time and the pressing rhythms that characterize contemporary society. Aimee declares: “Wrapped up in everyday life: an unexpected fog settling over a morning commute, golden sun shining on I am drawn to the nostalgic moments of bedroom curtains, a plush pink chair abandoned on the side of the road and gone the next day. What is fleeting and ethereal reminds me of the temporality of life and my place within it. I work from life and my photographs, often combining many different moments within one composition to build a visual narrative that feels both familiar and strange. Being present and seeking out small sublime moments within the mundane is where I make art; this process of taking time to seek and translate what I see into painting has become my subversion of the pressing speed that defines our cultural moment. For me, art-making is an act of devotion, an avenue to see the world and hold it close”. Filled. Overflowing, and Morning Light in Teal are two paintings starring sunlight, of which she has long studied its properties and characteristics. It shines and bounces on the surface of objects, and representing it means stopping a moment in time because the light and shadow will not be the same in an hour or a minute, giving a sense of immediacy to both the process and to the final piece: “I capture these moments in time quickly with loose brushstrokes, trusting that the fluidity of the signs represents the weightlessness of the moving light.” — Text by Laura Pieri

1 Filled. Overflowing. 2021 Oil on panel 30,5 x 30,5 cm

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ARTIST N°89

FROM FRANCE

SALZGEBER LUCIA

194

Lucia Salzgeber (b. 1988) is a French artist who lives and works in Montours. She holds an MA in Fine Art from the National School of Art of Brittany. Salzgeber produces words, lines and spatial settings. From 2012 to 2014, she led the Morpho cultural project in Nantes, a laboratory of techniques and humanities, and until 2016, she was also associated with the supervision of research and creative laboratory at the National Higher School of Art in Brittany. In 2017 Lucia led the creation and construction of a new cultural place in Montours, Ille-et-Vilaine, in France, where she built her studio. Taking a direct cue from life and its mechanisms, intimate and collective experiences she had from a young age, she tried to portray a glimpse of the furious, wounded, ambiguous and primordial intensity of herself and the other. Constantly aware that the ability to transcend oneself is one of the qualities and the best capacity of the human: being fragmented enhances life during the long moments of creation in intense loneliness and gives life to installations that mix up the body, pictorial languages and performative drawing, filling dozens of notebooks that I always carry with me. Writing is a way to “heal” the mind. I am standing in a black apron and hands greased with black ink, measuring white paper. I silently beat the rhythm of a single piece of classical music that envelops me for hours. Equipped with my thick scratches, I rest my body on the ground and on the white surface, which moves with me at this moment”. The artist, in her practice, investigates objects, forms and time by digging white with black, releasing black and delivering white - writing a timeless temporality. Like a perpetual beginning, with an intangible fever, her work is a path between painting, writing and installations, a triad that gives all the thickness to her work. — Text by Laura Pieri

1 1 Froide 2021 Engraving Ink on wood paper 80 x 120 cm

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ARTIST N°90

SERI GIULIA

FROM ITALY

196

Giulia Seri (1988, Rome) has been living and working in Florence since 2008. After graduating with a master’s degree in biology she studied painting at the Art Students League of New York and in 2017 she obtained a scholarship to the international school of graphic art Il Bisonte in Florence. She has participated in group and solo exhibitions as well as art residencies in Italy and abroad. In her work she uses different techniques: painting, engraving, sculpture and installation. In her works Giulia Seri investigates the randomness of the formation of living beings, the condition of humans within the absurdity of existence. Giulia Seri’s research focuses on the theme of depression, on the distorted perception of the body, on the precariousness of the conception of identity. Focusing on the human being and their relationship with life and death, the artist portrays through painting, drawing and sculpture, the fragile conditions of our existence, the states of transition, mental and bodily. Seri is particularly fascinated by the rituals and customs of the ancient Egyptian civilization and in particular by the Book of the Dead, a funerary text intended to assist the deceased in their journey to the afterlife. The sculptural production and representation of anthropomorphic bodies reference animal and mythological resemblances.

REA ART FAIR! 2021

1 Sfinge 2020 Bread, wax 87 x 38 x 53 cm

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ARTIST N°91

FROM ITALY

SIMEONI ILARIA

198

Ilaria Simeoni (b. 1995) is an Italian artist who lives and works between Venice and Trevignano. She holds an MA in Fine Art (Painting and Visual Arts) from the Venice Academy. Simeoni has participated in a series of group exhibitions of painting and engraving, and in 2020 she participated in the 103rd group exhibition of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation at the gallery of St. Mark’s Square, where she was awarded the first prize with the work Al Mutare Delle Ombre. Her artistic practice is linked to a personal vision of nature and the approach of Plein Air, which since the beginning has allowed her to synthesize the various concepts of uncontaminated landscape. This study of landscape nature is not to be considered only a silent representation of reality but is, first of all, a manifestation of the relationship between the aspects of the soul, the natural and its interpretation. Inspired by Baudelaire’s statement that it is necessary to know the elements of nature and the soul, Ilaria creates landscapes depicting visual-imaginative aspects linked to the sensitive data. Today she turns her attention to confined natural spaces and cultural tradition linked to them: “This total vision of uncontaminated nature over the years has approached an interest in cultivated environments and a mink of nature closer to everyday life. Thus the interest in gardens was born. The nature of the garden as a philosophy of thought and vision of refuge as an ideal and intimate place”. A close relationship that binds the soul of the garden to the world and to the living beings that inhabit it, triggering memories and feelings of the soul: “In the shadow of the flower bed of Lily, appears at first a modern flower bed of a house, located in a small country village. The uniqueness generated by these few elements has a continuous and infinite vision of plant life where this immensity is like the universe that has neither width nor depth because it contains the totality of the cosmos. The garden becomes the narrator of a dialogue with Man and the world, where everything that happens in the green space is full of metaphors of our psychic life”. — Text by Laura Pieri

1 All’ombra dell’aiuola dei fiori di giglio 2021 Oil on canvas 211,5 x 150,5 cm 1

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ARTIST N°92

FROM ITALY

SOARDI THOMAS

200

Thomas Soardi (b. 1991) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Milan. He holds a degree in Fashion Design from NABA. Between 2019 and 2020, Soardi was an artist in residence in the spaces of VIR Via Farini in Milan. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Palazzo Santi Civic Museum in Cascia (PG) and Via Farini open studio in Milan (MI). In 2018 Thomas had his first solo show at Plasma Plastic Modern Art, Milan (MI). He is a multidisciplinary artist whose research revolves around three macro themes simultaneously involved and naturally manages to coexist in his works of art. These three arguments initially start from a decisive investigation of space and the meaning that defines and regulates it, coming to study privatisation processes, that is - the regulation that the human experience projects onto it, mixing in architecture and urban planning. Another theme that characterises the artist’s research is his interest in ethology within the animal kingdom and, therefore, the aspects that relate humanity to the life of other species. On the other hand, treatment is another theme studied by Soardi through the employment of psychic and physical support devices invented throughout science history. To give an example of research that he has carried out in the past, autotomy is the ability of certain insects to self-mutilate while escaping aggression by possible predators. This phenomenon is examined through the specific areas and therefore studied under the aspects that characterise it in the environment in which it naturally occurs through physical and psychological regulation. The work U25 aims to rehearse an experiment conducted by the ethnologist John Bumpass Calhoun in 1968. The experiment consisted of constructing a cistern that lent itself to accommodate a colony of domestic rats, which, despite being given maximum comfort, soon manifested anomalous behaviours that led the colony to death. The study was later considered by sociologists and anthropologists who called it a behavioural sewer, used to denote the collapse of society due to behavioural anomalies caused by overpopulation. The installation, made part of a stainless steel chain, refers to an instrument of constriction in which we find three glazed ceramic sculptures depicting three laboratory guinea pigtails. The image created suggests the absence of space and the constraint that, together with the three queues, calls for the control of space and overcrowding. Thomas’s vision is strongly linked to the concept of material and the formal tension that it can create at the time of its formalisation to convey appropriate solicitations for his substantial conceptual research. The media used in his practice range from installation to photography, drawing, graphics and textile art. — Text by Milena Zanetti

1-2 U25 2021 Chromed stainless steel, glazed ceramics 43 x 14x 19,5 cm

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ARTIST N°93

FROM UNITED KINGDOM

STRATTON PATRICK

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Patrick Stratton (b. 1994) is a British artist who lives and works in London. He holds a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Leeds, HNC at Kensington and Chelsea College and is currently attending an MA course at the City and Guilds of London Art School. The scientific and artistic training allowed Stratton to combine these two aspects in a single research and create works in which the mechanical and manual components coexist harmoniously. He documents social Microsystems and moments of daily life through weaving and electronics by taking objects and actions of everyday life and converting them into a moving tapestry. Patrick explains why he decided to make weaving his style: “I appreciate weaving for its restrictions, it works similarly to the way an inkjet printer operates, creating the image one line at a time [I find it particularly inspiring] when the restrictions inherent in weaving lead to different solutions. This means that depicting an object becomes a problem-solving experiment. This interest in its restrictions has remained with me, along with the comfort that this aspect of problem-solving brings, and has become fundamental in my practice. Step in Gum is part of The Things I Do Sometimes series and is the work that led him to move from small to large format: “Patrick Stratton’s series of smallscale tapestries embraces aspects of contemporary life in many ways. [Mindful of the social change experienced recently] we all had more time to reflect on our lives and actions; what was important became insignificant, and the insignificant moments of daily life amplified. Patrick Stratton, using the long traditions of tapestry, weaves those moments into small-scale humorous classic works of art that share with us the moment when chewing gum sticks to the heel of his shoe, now the pink threads of wool stretch and relax in a looped memorial of that significantly insignificant moment. The activity of grating cheese, cleaning teeth and doing sit-ups. Everyone now repeats their actions as fragments of his day, the rest of which is left to our imagination” – Clare Denton. — Text by Laura Pieri

Things I do sometimes: step in gum 2020 Tapestry and electronics 90 x 74 x 14 cm

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ARTIST N°94

FROM ITALY

VALERIO CLAUDIO

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Claudio Valerio (b. 1991) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Bologna. He obtained a BA in Fine Art (Painting) from the L’Aquila Academy of Fine Arts while simultaneously teaching a painting workshop at the Academy. Valerio is currently studying for an MA in Fine Art (Painting and Visual Arts) at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts. His research is mainly pictorial, although the artist always remains open to experimentation with various mediums. My research reflects concepts such as the unknown, the almost, the hidden, the ineffable with particular reference to pictorial practice. His creative process is attentive when studying the materials and confronts an oxymoronic and paradoxical reality, aiming to lay bridges to regions of meaning, which are by nature unknown and indefinable. Claudio believes that within pictorial practice lies a cognitive possibility capable of questioning reality. Memento Mori is gloomy, dreamy and full of contradictions. The bottom part of the painting seems to gently invade the calm, ghostly, semi-transparent surface of the top of the piece. The work’s colour scheme is very atmospheric, with its shades of cedar brown, ochre and a drop of ecru creating a sense of controlled tension. At first glance, the painting appears deceptively serene, but the more I look at it, the more apparent the feeling of anxiousness and melancholia grows. You begin to question the reality in front of your eyes: what am I looking at? Has it got a specific meaning? Or is it, just like any reality, unstable, personal, and is open to interpretation? My gaze gets lost and delightfully consumed by the gentle sways of what I read as smoke. Much like those delicate marks, I feel that I become slowly dissolved and disperse in the sublime unknown, and somehow, it feels right to be consumed by Memento Mori. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 Memento Mori 2020 Oil on canvas 70 x 70 cm

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ARTIST N°95

FROM NETHERLANDS

VELDHUIS STEF

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First displayed at the former Doornburgh monastery (NL), these site-specific installations use beeswax to establish a new perspective on the human habitat. The installation was inspired by architect Dom Hans van der Laan saying: “Nature […] is unfathomable. Its forms have countless sizes. Architecture, as the fundamental HABITUS is there to surround us like clothing and to make our environment readable.”. Using the beeswax, artist Stef Veldhuis (b. 1992) counters this principle by using natural materials to rediscover the man-made space. For the REA Art Fair, two new interventions have been created. The Entrance, and the Threshold. Between two of the existing columns of Fabbrica del Vappore, a threshold is placed. This small intervention transforms the space between the two pillars into a site of transition. Traversing over the doorsill signifies change, similar to the uses of thresholds in ancient European and African rites of passage. It divides the space into an inside/outside, before/after, with the liminal space (“the physical spaces between one destination and the next.”) of the beeswax border in the middle. The doorsill can be frequently observed in Chinese architecture where superstition dictated that it would keep the souls of the deceased from leaving the house, whilst at the same time preventing evil spirits from entering.

1-2 Telling the bees 2021 Beewax Site specific installation

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ARTIST N°96

VITALI PIETRO

FROM ITALY

208

Pietro Vitali was born in Lecco in 1994. After attending the artistic high school Medardo Rosso in Lecco, he obtains in 2019 the three-year degree in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Giacomo Carrara in Bergamo. Growing up in a family engaged in construction activities, he has always been in contact with the earth, excavation and cement. The development of a fascination for these elements leads him to build an imaginary related to them, investigating their possible forms and observing the dynamics between them. Pietro Vitali’s work speaks of the ways in which the fusion of the human factor and the natural process, result in unforeseen formations. He draws inspiration from architectural structures, archaeology, geology and so on, in order to initiate reactions between elements such as cement, iron oxide, gypsum, ash, snow and water. Hollow spaces become moulds and solid complementary of partially twin structures are produced, as Vitali pours molten materials in cavernous natural openings, making them exist in a separate and autonomous dimension. The research thus focuses on the space immediately adjacent to the source structures. Source structures; the latter are forms generated by phenomena of erosion and physical decay of materials, that for their organic nature mutate, continuously redetermining their conformations. The aesthetic expression is the result of a continuous contamination between a sculptural practice of excavation and exhumation and the same processes of decay of materials; the final result often has an uncontrollable aspect, derived from a conscious and a spontaneous action. Through the direct taking of the positives with cement castings, the negatives of these forms are thus obtained and at the at the same time an imprint of the metamorphosis is taking place on the material.

1 ARIA DURA 2020 Cement, gypsum, graphite and iron oxide Variable dimensions

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ARTIST N°97

FROM ITALY

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VOLONTERIO MATTEO

Matteo Volonterio, born in Bergamo, lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He grew up in the valleys of Bergamo, and this has influenced his artistic practice: most of the sculptures are inspired by the typical hunting hut of the area. Hybridization is the main topic and purpose of his works. He creates relationships between human and natural elements, chemical and organic materials. During his academic studies at Accademia di Belle Arti G. Carrara (BG), he worked with different media, from installations to 3D modeling, from photography to sculpture, without ever straying too far from the concreteness of the materials which he’s most attached to. Plants, cement, wood, polyurethane, moss. He projects and realizes small and large spaces by assembling exhausted products and consumer objects. Then, weaving an aesthetic relationship between them until they become a whole, a tentacular aesthetic organism. His purpose is to move from creating “works that talk about” to “works that interact with”. He believes that art has an ethical function as well as an aesthetic one, and for this reason it has the duty to take part in the great challenges of modernity, first of all the environmental issue. Aesthetic and intellectual speculation allows us to imagine and model alternative forms of futures to overcome the dynamics of exploitation on which our cultural hegemony is based. The Symbiosis Project is all about this: designing in 3D and printing site-specific art installations aimed at the ecological regeneration of specific habitats. Born as a thesis project in collaboration with curator Eleonora Garini, it is now the artist’s most important ambition and the reason for which he lives in the Netherlands. Volonterio graduated with honors in Visual Arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti G. Carrara in Bergamo, Italy. He was awarded three merit scholarships at the same Academy. Moreover, in 2019, He was selected for the National Fine Arts Award, and in 2020 he won the Top 15 Talent Prize of Paratissima in Turin. Since the beginning of his academic career, he has participated in twelve exhibitions, including five in Bergamo (at Spazio Gamec, Luogo_e, Spazio Giacomo, and Ex Prison Sant’Agata and Accademia G. Carrara), two in Turin (Paratissima Art Station and Accademia Alberitna), and one in Venice (Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello).

1 Auri vanitas 2021 24 x 48 x 16 cm Mixed media 2 City Tree 2019 3D structure

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ARTIST N°98

FROM ITALY

VULLO FRANCESCO

212

Francesco Ideale Vullo (b. 1994) is an Italian artist who lives and works between Milan and Sicily. For almost 20 years, he has lived between the hinterland and the east coast of Sicily: the strong connection with the natural world, historical scenery, and multiple cultural influences have become a source of inspiration, contributing significantly to distinguish and raise awareness of his poetics. In 2016 he graduated in Illustration and Animation from the European Institute of Design in Milan. After several years of editorial and advertising illustration, Vullo began to be interested in the plastic arts, with particular attention to sculpture and installation. In his artistic research, he uses and reinterprets everyday objects to tell aspects of the human being and modern society. Fascinated by the symbolic power that they can assume, Francesco investigates their ability to evoke feelings and affective scenarios and collect and transmit memories. The research of materials plays a primary role, meeting the sculptural practice to which he dedicates himself and distinguishing himself for a multiform formal and technical variety. Found objects, natural elements and waste materials become catalysts for the artist’s explorations. The most recurring themes concern the relationship between the natural and the artificial world, the emotional tensions of man. The reinterpretation and reconfiguration of objects and work tools turn into surreal, simultaneously poetic representations that tell the contemporaneity. In the environmental works Alterations Series, natural stones collected on the Sicilian coasts are compressed by plastic clamps or metal structures that irreversibly alter their shapes. In a surreal action, the industrial element quickly transforms the morphology of the rocks, replacing a prolonged process that is usually carried out by natural agents such as wind, rain, the flow of river waters or sea waves. A reflection on how the human being with his activities has succeeded with territorial, structural and climatic changes affects geological processes. The works develop taking totems, which with their monolithic rigidity oppose the organic forms they dialogue. The sculptures subvert the viewer’s physical perception with solid visual contrast, creating a sense of disorientation. The cable ties change the shape of the stones, creating a sensory, short circuit that leads us to question the actual consistency of the rocks. — Francesco Vullo

1 Islands 2021 Natural stones, plastic clamps, stainless steel, concrete H90 X W24,5 X D24,5 cm

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ARTIST N°99

FROM UNITED KINGDOM

WILSON STUART MEL

214

Wilson Stuart Mel (b. 1986) is a British artist based in the northeast of England. He holds a degree in Contemporary Art and Critical Theory from the Goldsmith College of Arts in London. Wilson has taken part in a variety of group and solo exhibitions over the past two years. He creates large-scale works that he projects into space; in this way, the two-dimensional nature of the work is transformed into an installation object between sculpture and drawing. The driving factors of Stuart’s work come from themes such as morality and ethics, which, together with dogmatic thinking and code, give life to the reflection on how we process the world as a collectivity and as individuals. Another fundamental aspect of his art is the relationship with words, language and the nature of communication concerning the image. The creation process is characterized by the traditional use of drawing that remains conservative in aesthetics but not in the intentions: to give life to his works, the artist uses found objects, driven by the need not to realize valuable pieces that over time would become a commodity. This aspect is fundamental and is a direct criticism of society and the world of contemporary art characterized by transient and ephemeral fashions. Wilson’s works commonly refer to the paintings of the European Renaissance, a period of history in which the art had a central status and exalted in the culture: “I examine the contradictions and paradoxes in the idea of the artist as a teacher when one of the main roles of the object of art in the world today often seems to function as a means to showcase the wealth and affirm their social status”. I Don’t Like Shakespeare is an ironic self-portrait that describes the pain of being creative in producing something good for the world. With this work, Stuart demonstrates his willingness to enter the space to attract the viewer in and around the work, encouraging an unconscious language between the work and its viewer. — Text by Laura Pieri

1 I don’t like Shakespeare 2021 Drawing installation on plaster board H180 x W110 x D72 cm

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ARTIST N°100

ZHENG XU

FROM CHINA

216

Xu Zheng (b. 1995) is a Chinese artist who lives and works in Milan. He holds a BA in Fine Art (Painting) from the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts obtained in 2020. Xu is now studying for an MA in Fine Art at the same Academy. He has been involved in various shows, the most recent one held in 2020 entitled From a Newspaper Imposed, which took place at his Academy. I work mainly with monochrome surfaces, through which I analyse the relationship between emptiness and space. Zheng borrows imagery taken from nature and things surrounding him, creating powerful artworks that instantly evoke a sense of tranquillity in the viewer. The blank spaces present in his paintings aren’t empty even when technically there aren’t any forms or colours there; those spaces are a critical point in the works, to which the artist attaches great importance: according to him, the image breathes through the openings, and it’s the space that gives life to the light brushstrokes next to them. The concept of white space is significant and is present in traditional Chinese painting, where all the figures serving a cathartic purpose have a white outline. The stressing of the empty space is a Daoist feature: it is a philosophical concept, a synonym of void or nothingness. Daoism advocated attaining the limit of open space, retaining extreme stillness, further regarding that only the Dao (Way) accumulates space. Empty space is regarded as the beginning of myriad things so that it can be considered a foundation of Daoist philosophy - Space is the heart’s fasting. The Chan (Zen) school of Buddhism also emphasises that what is the form that is emptiness, what is the emptiness that is the form. This concept is very present in the artwork presented at the Fair - entitled Flirt - it is simultaneously delicate, dynamic, and very much alive. — Text by Maria Myasnikova

1 Flirt 2021 Oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm

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CATALOGUE

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REA ART FAIR! 2021

ReA! Art Fair acts as a platform, a starting point, a link between an emerging artist and the art world.

5/5

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GUEST ARTISTS | ARTODAY

220

Telling the stories of the best emerging talents of the contemporary art scene and supporting their work has become the guideline of the project.

REA ART FAIR! 2021

221

Artoday is a project founded in 2017 by Federico Montagna and Alessia Romano. It was born as a digital incubator of contemporary art, according to the founders’ vision. Passion and determination have always been the key words that distinguish and that have allowed Artoday to be a project capable of promoting and supporting today’s art in today’s world. Telling the stories of the best emerging talents of the contemporary art scene and supporting their work has become the guideline of the project. Their approach, from the beginning, has been described by many professionals in the sector as “new”, defining their profession as that of Digital Curators. A profession that just a few years ago could be considered utopian, almost senseless, but which in fact consists of the work of selection, storytelling and sharing of art through the online. It considers Instagram as if it was a “gallery” that presents artists chosen through a careful process of study and research, on a daily and weekly basis. The artist scouting, above all, is done offline to avoid incurring a risk to which many people are subject, connected to the deception of numbers: “the more online following an artist has, the more valid they are”. For Artoday social media became the fundamental channels to take the operation to the next step - which means interaction, and therefore the construction of a vast network (currently made up of over 16.5 thousand users). The aim of the project is supporting the work of those who are building and defining the art of the future. The community that has been created around Artoday is as varied as the whole art system is: collectors, curators, journalists, gallery owners, critics and artists are put on the same level and are connected through a metaphorical bride, a link, order to create a sharing platform which, in the first place, has the goal of creating contact between the different projects within the system, but at the same time, aims to ensure that art is conveyed to a new and wider audience. Over the years Artoday has developed online and offline formats and events that are “within everyone’s reach”. The way in which art is narrated, described and communicated is as simple and immediate as possible.

N°101

FROM ITALY

ARANI FEDERICO

222

Federico Arani (1995, Rome). In Federico Arani’s work, space is a cognitive device, a fluid tool freed from the chronological linearity of language and thought. Tempered by the pluralities of Rome, by Sci-Fi literature and by Spaghetti Westerns, his research is conceived as an ecosystem, an ever-evolving organism that investigates the concepts of evolution and cognitive revolution, as well as the relationships between languages and knowledge, between consciousness and nature.His works are images that dig into changes of state, into points of fusion and transformation; thought and objects full of subversive restrained energy and limbo-places that invite one to look for the right position to enter them. The recent series of Odradek works is born from a series of questions that have arisen by investigating the possibilities of overturning the links between language and the processes of empirical-cognitive perception and connection with reality, both as a collective global consciousness and as individual bodies. In these works, the artist’s intention is to build wearable devices, harnessing the open questions about their very nature and their function, similar to creatures that embody the limbo of their inability to self-determine, like defused objects waiting to be picked up and be worn again. Are they prostheses for the body or are they an extension of it? Are they objects that come from the past or the future? They ask questions and invite hypothetical action, like Les machines célibataires that never define certainties, but always generate new questions and tenaciously call for a possible alternative.

1-2 Nautilus 2019 Sound performance, wood, iron, fabric, rubber, speakers, vulcanic rock, ground, animal bones, bullets, inkjet print on paper, screen print on sweatshirt 59:44 min, V.D. Performer: YIIXIII

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N°102

FROM ITALY

SCHIAVONE MARCO

224

Marco Schiavone (1990, Turin). The intimacy of the surrounding landscape and how it appears in the eyes of those who observe it: nature, the environment, the territory, mainly surrounding or geographically close, is what Marco Schiavone’s research focuses on. Starting from the exploration of the place in consideration, from its structural and material dimensions,it is analyzed in its principle, in its original form, and subsequently adopts an foreign, external element, which is positioned and placed in dialogue with context that is not its own. Hence arises the interest and curiosity to understand how an element can change and constrain the narration of the landscape and, generally, of an image. For this reason, the use of a net for climbing plants becomes the element through which the artist’s research develops: positioned like a cloth stretched over different surfaces, it leaves an imprint of itself that modifies the original underlying structure. Once the photograph has been taken and printed, the mesh, or rather its imprint, is drawn on tracing paper, leaving the image imprinted by this forcibly inserted “foreign body” as a result. It is isolated to understand what the shape actually is, and the design that modifies the reading of the image and therefore that of an altered landscape. Drawing becomes an instrument of comparison with photography, needed to better understand the process and result of research and its development.

1-2 Volume doppio 01 2019 Diptych fine art print on Innova paper 100% cotton 320g and one print on tracing paper 129,5 x 86,5 cm

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CATALOGUE

226

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ReA! Art Fair draws inspiration from the original concept of the Biennale: a platform to celebrate emerging artists without a gallery or museum mediating the exchange between creators and their audience. Now in its second year, ReA! is pulling broadly from the current climate, attempting to showcase the “harmony” which can be created when cultural limitations are removed: an ergonomic society which is free of oppressive categorizations, one where a collection of narratives can emerge and exist together, without division. What separated the fair is the emphasis we place on Artists and individual creators, not only their selected works. The creators selected to exhibit at the Fair represent a shifting paradigm within the art world: individuals for whom innovation is hard-coded into the DNA of their potentiality. Everyone chosen to participate is an emerging artist without extensive exhibiting experience, to whom we want to give a chance of becoming a part of the art scene. For us, the medium - whether that was painting, video art, or a performance piece had little to do with our final decisions, what was essential was the execution - if the idea that the Artist was searching to communicate, corresponded to the visual representation. ReA! Art Fair acts as a platform, a starting point, a link between an emerging artist and the art world. The artists’ evaluation is based on guidelines that also consider the different career points - from that perspective, the Fair acts as a kickstart, ensuring steady artistic growth in their future career. We are working towards creating a more intimate communication between the society and the emerging artists, as well as the curators. As you walk through the Fair, you might find yourself following a path, a natural flow, a connection between the artworks as an intricate storyline unfolds before your eyes. The artists haven’t been conditioned to work on a specific subject; we want to unite them so that a beautiful connection between all the art pieces and the exhibition space of Fabbrica Del Vapore will be created. The reason why the exhibition spans so many types of artworks, ranging from oil paintings to performing arts, is because we aim to change society’s point of view about the value of art. It isn’t just about collecting or decorating your home, but rather about creating a connection with the world as a political being where one begins to own, sustain and encourage ideas. — The Curatorial Team

As you walk through the Fair, you might find yourself following a path, a natural flow, a connection between the artworks as an intricate storyline unfolds before your eyes.