The programme at the church of Santa Maria della Spina on the Lungarno Gambacorti continues. Yesterday (Thursday 10 June) the exhibition by Antonio Cagianelli entitled "I Capricci" was inaugurated. The exhibition, organised by the Department of Culture together with the Friends of Pisan Museums and Monuments, will remain open until 25 June :
Inauguration 10 June 2021 from 17.00 - 19.00;
From 11 June to 21 June 2021 from 11.00 - 13.00 / 17.00 - 19.00
Reservations are required from 22 to 25 June by contacting n. 3204876751
After the "Vanitas", the "Capricci", after graffiti and tattoos, hieroglyphics and sphinxes, after spheres, pyramids; this is how one can summarise Antonio Cagianelli's new programme of expressive development. His poetics as a designer attentive to the continuous metamorphosis of reality is poured into his three-dimensional creations in the form of furniture, other times jewellery, furnishing accessories, fashion accessories and now, for the first time, photography. Cagianelli's discourse is not about design or habitat in the traditional sense, but about a personal vision of the world that his creations are invited to represent. A vision of the world in which the past and the future are in direct communication, giving rise to works in which influences from archaic worlds, esoteric elements and the signs of the contemporary metropolis coexist and mix in an analogical and mediumistic way; all expressed through a pop and surreal language. These range from his skull-shaped 'Transvital' seats, which are to be considered as real three-dimensional vanitas, to the new 'Sphinx' seats, which break inexorably into the artist's new creative landscape with their message full of mystery and open question marks about our future. In a world that no longer has any answers to our questions, Cagianelli in his latest graphics (silk-screen prints on large-format plastic laminates) chooses to allude to the pictorial genre of Capricci, based precisely on nostalgic and imaginative compositions of elements from the past, to find a sense and a strength that can help us survive the apocalypse of the contemporary world. The compositional method of "Capricci" is also applied to his brand new photographic project, presented at Fuorisalone 2020 with his Milanese gallery of reference, Galleria Colombari, and representing a further step forward in his graphic work, which is also the basis of many pieces of furniture and textiles created previously. The experience of the photographic "Capricci" was born during the period of the health emergency from a physically static but intellectually very dynamic reflection. In this body of photographic works Cagianelli, with his shocking juxtapositions, real visual oxymorons, creates an unexpected dialogue between cultures, languages and signs of ancient civilisations, as well as pop-rock experiences from his repertoire as an artist-designer, Street Art and psychedelic art. The word "contaminations", in this dramatic moment in which we have lived in isolation and rightly fear being contaminated, is to be understood, for Cagianelli, with a positive meaning of interculturality and dialogue between different languages and artistic fields.
In a vision in which time acquires a synchronic dimension, reminiscent of Jungian memory, the artist gives life to his photographic compositions inspired by ancient Egypt through people belonging to the everyday life of his relations, whose features, particularly evocative, are close to his free fantasies on elements of ancient art. The hieroglyphics are superimposed on the graffiti of Street Art, and the unmistakable profiles of some Etruscan statues are superimposed on the profiles of young women of today, in which a memory of features that take us back to a distant past survives, following a spiral and a time vortex in continuous evolution, reminiscent of the graphic experiments of Dadaist photocollages and the psychedelic culture of the 1970s.
His latest photographic works on the theme of the mummy in particular, halfway between quotations from icons of the ancient world and references to the horror genre, are a new cult expression of Cagianelli's universe, which is provocative, eclectic and surreal.
