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Alessandro Words | Courtney L. Sexton
Feb. - Mar. 2012
or the young Italian illustrator, Alessandro Gottardo aka “Shout,” the message is crucial, but even more so, is the way in which it is delivered. “I love the messages underlying visual art,” says Gottardo. “I love the concepts and ideas, but [what I want] is to avoid everything that can hide that main message.” When creating art, Gottardo strives to be “straight and to the point,” expressing his ideas with “no make-up.” Gottardo graduated from the Instituto Europeo del Design in Milan in 2000 and began his career as an agencyrepresented artist, receiving his first assignment the following year. For the next couple of years, Gottardo continued to build his portfolio and experiment with his own styles, slowly collecting them into a virtual gallery. Eventually, in 2005, he was able to branch out on his own when, he says, “[he] finally matured [his] style into ‘Shout’.” The nickname came from one of the images in his “Indigo” collection (displayed at Known Gallery in L.A.) and depicts the outline of a man’s head shouting through a hole in the ground. Gottardo says that little by little he is moving back to using his own name, but for now, the moniker has stuck, and is perhaps fitting. Gottardo’s images don’t yell at you, but their meaning still comes across loud and clear. So just what is it that makes this artist’s work shout-worthy? A lot. In a simple, yet elegant, sometimes almost folk-y style, Gottardo manages to capture viewers’ gazes and then lets them just look, getting lost in the space on the page and coming away with an awareness of something they didn’t even know they had opinions about, or perhaps, didn’t before. Gottardo, unlike many of his contemporaries, is not pressured by the heady sense of tradition that so often overwhelms Italian art. Rather, he respects it, has learned from it, and has chosen to expand it in his own way. “People here are always looking at the past scarily, I prefer to look at the future, I respect my roots, but I’m also curious to know what will happen next.” While he is inspired by everyday life, Gottardo cites some of his artistic influences as Giorgio de Chirico, Mark Rothko, Toulouse Lautrec, and Marcel Dzama, and you can see these influences in his clean lines (recalling de Chirico’s orthogonals) and restricted color palettes (a nod to Rothko). Like Lautrec, Gottardo gives us what seems like an outsider’s view into another world. Instead of the underbelly of Paris’s Bohemian Revolution, however, it is the world we live in, filtered through Gottardo’s own headspace. “The wide spaces in some of my images let my mind think, [they] open [the illustration].” These wide spaces are particularly enticing because they are balanced in most of Gottardo’s work by focal points, both visual and psychological. His works are attractive to an array of tastes as they alternate between political and social commentary (i.e. “A Farewell to Arms” in which we see a tin soldier as he walks away after laying down his gun amid a check board of other identical soldiers who stand at attention), contemplative (as in “Living and Dying with Dignity” where a small man sits beneath a tree with one leaf left on it), and simply sweetly creative; a woman in a red dress hangs musical notes along a staff suspended like a clothesline. When asked about his penchant for sending messages through his work (whether they be political, social or emotional) Gottardo responded, “I love to have an opinion on everything I see. I think of my work as a spotlight over matters. I don’t want to argue about big questions, but keep my eyes on them. I highlight the issues, that’s what I want to do.” That’s exactly what he does do, and he trains our eyes toward those issues as well. Gottardo, who tries to leave in his pieces just “the core of what is important,” hopes that people who see his work feel something. To that I say, they’d be hard-pressed not to. Look for Alessandro Gottardo’s newest series of works on display at the Antonio Colombo Gallery in Milan beginning in February.