Device (Caravaggio Medusa)

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Nicola Vincenzo Piscopo
Device (Caravaggio Medusa)
2021

About the Item

Device (autoritratto), Acrylic on board 20 x 46 x 1.4 cm. If it is true that painting is the first means of producing images and vehicle of messages for the community, it is undeniable that the advent of digital media first, and then of social networks, has changed visual communication, increasing the rhythms of production. . This has resulted in a change in the user experience: today we are witnessing a visual inflation that causes, on the one hand, nausea due to an accumulation of information and, on the other, a linguistic impoverishment, which is followed by the degeneration of the world itself. . In the context of this corrupt view, the painter's role is questioned as his language becomes increasingly limited. For Piscopo, this translates into the subjection of the screens, therefore, to the use of pre-packaged images that flatten the genius, in the evidence of a low-definition painting and the elimination of portions of images. It is thus possible to see works in the exhibition in which torment and nauseating sensations are outlined, thanks to the alternation of paintings with a strongly emotional pointillist brushstroke, and highly polished works made with airbrush. The works range from famous subjects in the history of art to elements, iconic or not, that belong to digital everyday life. The human figures, shown on canvases in the 16: 9 format - allusions to the dimensions of an Instagram Story - are all represented with eyes and mouths of disproportionate dimensions. The artist therefore refers to a famous filter present on social networks, in order to emphasize the attention on the sight-taste senses of the user who devours the images, with the mouth and no longer with the eyes. The verticalism of the painting refers to the speed and evanescence of images that scroll vertically, like the scroll that is exercised on digital devices: each image cancels the previous one and none remains. Everything flows, as in a degenerate version of Heraclitus, so "you never get wet in the same river." Here, then, are depicted children addicted to their smartphone. Their feet are immersed in a river that overflows from the visual rectangle and whose brushstrokes break the verticality of the rest of the composition. The confusion between the two different flows, which children perceive, contributes to the disorientation of the vision. The Devices, the numerous eyes painted with airbrush, generate the sensation of feeling observed and suggest the separation between being and appearing. The eye becomes a device in its double meaning as a machine in charge of human vision and an imposing eye of society, an Orwellian reference, as in the case of the central Device, a painted sculpture within which the majolica flooring of the exhibition space is mirrored. Also in this case Piscopo does not depart from artistic references in the strict sense, painting eyes borrowed from the history of art, from characters from the world of entertainment, to figures from his private life. The short circuit, which is created in front of two painting techniques that referring almost to two different artists, underlines the distance between the image and the viewer: what is looked at turns out to be nauseating and psychedelic reality, while the viewer is lucid and real. Both the sighted and the seen, however, are injured: the bites that annihilate the dimensional limits of the "painting as a window to the world" point a light on the idea of visual consumerism; of the consumer who eats the image without properly assimilating it and who devours himself, emptying himself. The artistic production of Nicola Vincenzo Piscopo therefore reveals a self-destructive hallucination of the contemporary approach to the experience of seeing. There are many invitations to reflect, including the role of painter today, the growing desacralization of art that bends towards advertising and consumer purposes, the emptying of meaning that today's use of the image entails and the inversion of the victim-executioner relationship - in which society is oppressed by a rampant bulimia due to individual conduct. However, a positive and contradictory gaze remains: the crude narrative anguish and perplexing, but the story of the phenomenon, in its beauty, is proposed as an eye drop for an excessively reddened and corrupted sight.

Creator:
Nicola Vincenzo Piscopo (1990, Italian)
Creation Year:
2021
Dimensions:
Height: 8.67 in (22 cm)Width: 18.51 in (47 cm)Depth: 0.56 in (1.4 cm)
Medium:
Acrylic,Gold Leaf
Movement & Style:
Pop Art
Period:
2010-
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Napoli, IT
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU1731211314982