Nicola Vincenzo Piscopo
Device (Self-Portrait)
2021

About the Item

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: 17.72 in (45 cm)Width: 44.1 in (112 cm)Depth: 1.97 in (5 cm)
Medium:
Gold Leaf,Acrylic
Movement & Style:
Pop Art
Period:
2010-
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Napoli, IT
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU173129538142