A Life of Fake News
Painting — as well as reproduction techniques akin to it on the plane of two-dimensionality and 'low definition,' such as graphics, comics and advertising images — has currently become a privileged instrument of artistic expression.
Art in general has, for some years now, been considered a 'fashionable' phenomenon. Aided by a largely artificial euphoria, determined, in my view, mainly by the invasiveness — in some respects also beneficial — of a communication apparatus that, ever more ravenous for topics to debate and broadcast, has lately discovered art too as the holder of a not-negligible niche of interest, especially when it employs the rhetorical tools of astonishment and sensationalism, as the shrewd marketing lesson of the new English art has well taught.
This 'return to painting' is the offspring of the weariness produced by the 1990s, partly perpetuated into the following decade, with their uninterrupted sequence of neo-conceptual gimmicks, banally citationist and sterile from a linguistic point of view. In reality painting, after an evident absence from the scene lasting some years — due to the phenomenology of an art that had imposed the minimalist and analytical ardours of historical Conceptualism — returned in force after the mid-1970s: at first alone, then from the 1980s onward, up to today, in the company of other expressive modes that give body to contemporary artistic eclecticism.
The pictorial medium is used to establish with the contemporary scenario a relationship of evocation, sublimating the real to draw out its hidden humours, challenging photography and forcing it to adapt by chasing it on its own ground. What today appears partly new and stimulating is the attitude of freely mixing traces and visions belonging equally to 'high' and 'low' culture. Passages of history mingle with psychedelic and metropolitan visions, together with symbols belonging to the traditional repertoire of pop art, as well as to fashion, illustration and comics, creating a balanced medley that seems to revive the splendours of the best 1980s, when the rediscovery of individualism and the search for a satisfying aesthetic able to contaminate genres manifested themselves.
The relationship between 'pure art' and 'applied art' — during the twentieth century often unbalanced in favour of the latter, ready to seize from the former its linguistic innovations to adapt them to mass culture — now seems positioned at a level of perfect balance, with the two fields taking on the function of communicating vessels. This vocation for a 'total' art — also found in forms of graphics that tend to create their own language, far from fashions, with an original grammar and vocabulary, in order to communicate in a world already saturated with signs; in eco-sustainable design, in Street Art and in particular forms of metropolitan artistic craftsmanship — constitutes the most relevant novelty of recent years.
The work of Akira Zakamoto, whom I culpably did not know, struck me positively for its ability to land hard blows on the hypocrisy of the society of spectacle and image that characterises our present dimension; using signs, symbols, objects and 'vintage' inserts, it fully belongs to the climate described above, to which it provides a contribution of considerable originality.
Zakamoto, by birth Luca Motolese, has a training and profession tied to advertising graphics, cinema and communication — all components found in that skilful medley of visual cues that are his compositions, almost always pictorial, with a skilful use of tonalities and chromatic scales, sometimes spilling into three dimensions, with the creation of ironically votive works, always inspired by his ability to create temporal short-circuits through the use of clippings from the media imaginary or tied to the childhood universe, with the creation of witty metaphors that speak of the contemporary by using symbols and icons of the recent past.
I viewed Zakamoto's output with great interest, divided into series linked by a precise ideological coherence, only apparently tempered by the aesthetic pleasantness of the composition. To launch effective messages there is no need to entrench oneself behind conceptual hermeticism; immediacy is an effective tool, didactically useful in creating an interest that then leads one to question the content of the representation. In some canvases symbols of the childhood imaginary predominate — retro toys, decorative patterns that play on the thread of memory, creating a subtle metaphysical suspension. In others the protagonists come from the world of Japanese manga and superhero robots that defend the world from the apocalypse, replicating the stoic self-denial and spirit of sacrifice of the samurai — icons from the author's adolescent visions who, like many of his generation, and partly of mine, fifteen years older, fell under the spell of Japan, seen as a land able to combine tradition with the future, discipline with an eccentric transgression.
The works selected for this solo show at Galleria Spazio 44 — which confirms its characteristic of making original, non-conformist choices — is titled 'Fake News,' and is a reflection on the fallacy and distortion of communication through the media, substantially unchanged in time and space, today amplified solely thanks to technological progress and simultaneous communication via the web.
Drawing on his spirit as a collector of vintage objects — a passion that in many ways unites us; in his studio one finds truly interesting and original artefacts of past decades — Zakamoto found, in second-hand markets and from private individuals, period front pages referring to some of the most significant events of twentieth-century history, the 'short century.' These front pages — drawn from events ranging from the Bolshevik revolution to the Second World War and the Nazi-Fascist illusion (even with defeat at the door) of being able to impose a new order, on to reconstruction and the economic boom, and closing with the 1960s and two antithetical, contradictory examples such as the space adventure and the senseless, tragic Vietnam War, destined to mark a generation negatively — are framed not before being painted over with disorienting icons. These represent figures of the artistic imaginary (Botticelli's Venus), the cultural one referring to the historical avant-gardes (the great poet Mayakovsky), comics and old video games (Japanese robots, Super Mario, Tiger Man), space exploration (Gagarin), cinema (Apocalypse Now) and more, establishing a metaphorical link with the printed page, in tune with the skilful interplay among various, always interconnected, levels of memory, image and communication that underlie Akira Zakamoto's original work.
Art in general has, for some years now, been considered a 'fashionable' phenomenon. Aided by a largely artificial euphoria, determined, in my view, mainly by the invasiveness — in some respects also beneficial — of a communication apparatus that, ever more ravenous for topics to debate and broadcast, has lately discovered art too as the holder of a not-negligible niche of interest, especially when it employs the rhetorical tools of astonishment and sensationalism, as the shrewd marketing lesson of the new English art has well taught.
This 'return to painting' is the offspring of the weariness produced by the 1990s, partly perpetuated into the following decade, with their uninterrupted sequence of neo-conceptual gimmicks, banally citationist and sterile from a linguistic point of view. In reality painting, after an evident absence from the scene lasting some years — due to the phenomenology of an art that had imposed the minimalist and analytical ardours of historical Conceptualism — returned in force after the mid-1970s: at first alone, then from the 1980s onward, up to today, in the company of other expressive modes that give body to contemporary artistic eclecticism.
The pictorial medium is used to establish with the contemporary scenario a relationship of evocation, sublimating the real to draw out its hidden humours, challenging photography and forcing it to adapt by chasing it on its own ground. What today appears partly new and stimulating is the attitude of freely mixing traces and visions belonging equally to 'high' and 'low' culture. Passages of history mingle with psychedelic and metropolitan visions, together with symbols belonging to the traditional repertoire of pop art, as well as to fashion, illustration and comics, creating a balanced medley that seems to revive the splendours of the best 1980s, when the rediscovery of individualism and the search for a satisfying aesthetic able to contaminate genres manifested themselves.
The relationship between 'pure art' and 'applied art' — during the twentieth century often unbalanced in favour of the latter, ready to seize from the former its linguistic innovations to adapt them to mass culture — now seems positioned at a level of perfect balance, with the two fields taking on the function of communicating vessels. This vocation for a 'total' art — also found in forms of graphics that tend to create their own language, far from fashions, with an original grammar and vocabulary, in order to communicate in a world already saturated with signs; in eco-sustainable design, in Street Art and in particular forms of metropolitan artistic craftsmanship — constitutes the most relevant novelty of recent years.
The work of Akira Zakamoto, whom I culpably did not know, struck me positively for its ability to land hard blows on the hypocrisy of the society of spectacle and image that characterises our present dimension; using signs, symbols, objects and 'vintage' inserts, it fully belongs to the climate described above, to which it provides a contribution of considerable originality.
Zakamoto, by birth Luca Motolese, has a training and profession tied to advertising graphics, cinema and communication — all components found in that skilful medley of visual cues that are his compositions, almost always pictorial, with a skilful use of tonalities and chromatic scales, sometimes spilling into three dimensions, with the creation of ironically votive works, always inspired by his ability to create temporal short-circuits through the use of clippings from the media imaginary or tied to the childhood universe, with the creation of witty metaphors that speak of the contemporary by using symbols and icons of the recent past.
I viewed Zakamoto's output with great interest, divided into series linked by a precise ideological coherence, only apparently tempered by the aesthetic pleasantness of the composition. To launch effective messages there is no need to entrench oneself behind conceptual hermeticism; immediacy is an effective tool, didactically useful in creating an interest that then leads one to question the content of the representation. In some canvases symbols of the childhood imaginary predominate — retro toys, decorative patterns that play on the thread of memory, creating a subtle metaphysical suspension. In others the protagonists come from the world of Japanese manga and superhero robots that defend the world from the apocalypse, replicating the stoic self-denial and spirit of sacrifice of the samurai — icons from the author's adolescent visions who, like many of his generation, and partly of mine, fifteen years older, fell under the spell of Japan, seen as a land able to combine tradition with the future, discipline with an eccentric transgression.
The works selected for this solo show at Galleria Spazio 44 — which confirms its characteristic of making original, non-conformist choices — is titled 'Fake News,' and is a reflection on the fallacy and distortion of communication through the media, substantially unchanged in time and space, today amplified solely thanks to technological progress and simultaneous communication via the web.
Drawing on his spirit as a collector of vintage objects — a passion that in many ways unites us; in his studio one finds truly interesting and original artefacts of past decades — Zakamoto found, in second-hand markets and from private individuals, period front pages referring to some of the most significant events of twentieth-century history, the 'short century.' These front pages — drawn from events ranging from the Bolshevik revolution to the Second World War and the Nazi-Fascist illusion (even with defeat at the door) of being able to impose a new order, on to reconstruction and the economic boom, and closing with the 1960s and two antithetical, contradictory examples such as the space adventure and the senseless, tragic Vietnam War, destined to mark a generation negatively — are framed not before being painted over with disorienting icons. These represent figures of the artistic imaginary (Botticelli's Venus), the cultural one referring to the historical avant-gardes (the great poet Mayakovsky), comics and old video games (Japanese robots, Super Mario, Tiger Man), space exploration (Gagarin), cinema (Apocalypse Now) and more, establishing a metaphorical link with the printed page, in tune with the skilful interplay among various, always interconnected, levels of memory, image and communication that underlie Akira Zakamoto's original work.
La pittura, così come tecniche di riproduzione affini sul piano della bidimensionalità e della "bassa definizione" quali grafica, fumetto, immagini pubblicitarie, è attualmente divenuta strumento privilegiato di espressione artistica.
L'arte in generale è, da un po' di anni, considerata fenomeno "alla moda".
Complice un'euforia in buona parte artificiosa e determinata, a mio parere, principalmente dall'invasività , per certi aspetti anche benefica, di un apparato comunicativo che, sempre più famelico di argomenti da dibattere e divulgare, ha scoperto, da ultimo, anche l'arte come detentrice di una non trascurabile nicchia di interesse, in particolar modo quando si avvale degli strumenti retorici dello stupore e del sensazionalismo, come ben ha insegnato la sagace lezione di marketing della nuova arte inglese.
Questo "ritorno alla pittura" è figlio della stanchezza prodotta dagli anni '90, in parte perpetuatasi anche nel decennio successivo, con la loro ininterrotta sequela di trovate neo-concettuali banalmente citazioniste e sterili dal punto di vista linguistico.
In realtà la pittura, dopo un'evidente assenza dalla scena durata alcuni anni, dovuta alla fenomenologia di un'arte che aveva imposto gli ardori minimalisti ed analitici del Concettuale storico, è ritornata in forze sulla scena dopo la metà degli anni ‘70, dapprima in solitaria, dagli anni '80 in poi, fino ad oggi, in compagnia di altre modalità espressive che danno corpo all'eclettismo artistico contemporaneo.
Il tramite pittorico viene usato per stabilire con lo scenario contemporaneo un rapporto di evocazione, sublimando il reale per trarne i riposti umori, sfidando la fotografia e costringendola a adeguarsi rincorrendola sul suo terreno.
Quanto oggi appare parzialmente inedito e stimolante è l'attitudine a mescolare con disinvoltura tracce e visioni appartenenti di pari alla cultura "alta" ed a quella "bassa".
Brani di storia si mescolano a visioni psichedeliche e metropolitane, insieme a simboli appartenenti al repertorio tradizionale della pop art, così come alla moda all'illustrazione, al fumetto, creando una equilibrata miscellanea che sembra rinverdire i fasti dei migliori anni Ottanta, quando si manifestò la riscoperta dell'individualismo e la ricerca di un'estetica appagante in grado di contaminare i generi.
Il rapporto tra "arte pura" ed "arte applicata", nel corso del Novecento spesso sbilanciato a favore della seconda, pronta a carpire dalla prima le innovazioni linguistiche per adattarle alla cultura di massa, adesso pare posizionato su di un livello di perfetto equilibrio, con i due ambiti ad assumere la funzione di vasi comunicanti.
Questa vocazione ad un ‘arte "totale", rinvenibile anche in forme di grafica che tendono alla creazione di un linguaggio proprio, lontano dalle mode, con una grammatica ed un vocabolario originali, per riuscire a comunicare in un mondo già saturo di segni, in un design ecosostenibile, nella Street Art ed in particolari forme di artigianato artistico metropolitano, costituisca la novità più rilevante di questi ultimi anni.
Il lavoro di Akira Zakamoto, che colpevolmente non conoscevo, mi ha positivamente colpito per la sua capacità di sferrare dei duri colpi all'ipocrisia della società dello spettacolo e dell'immagine che caratterizza la nostra dimensione attuale, adoperando segni, simboli, oggetti ed inserti "vintage", si ascrive in pieno alla temperie prima descritta, a cui fornisce un contributo di notevole originalità .
Zakamoto, all'anagrafe Luca Motolese, ha una formazione di studi e di professione legata alla grafica pubblicitaria, al cinema ed alla comunicazione, tutte componenti rinvenibili in quella sapiente miscellanea di spunti visivi che sono le sue composizioni, quasi sempre pittoriche, con un sapiente uso delle tonalità e delle scale cromatiche, talvolta sfocianti nella tridimensione, con la realizzazione di opere ironicamente votive, ispirate sempre alla sua capacità di creare dei corto circuiti temporali tramite l'uso di ritagli dell'immaginario mediale o legati all'universo infantile, con la creazione di argute metafore che parlano della contemporaneità adoperando simboli ed icone del recente passato.
Ho visionato con grande interesse la produzione di Zakamoto, divisa in serie tra loro collegate da una precisa coerenza ideologica, solo in apparenza temperata dalla piacevolezza estetica della composizione.
Per lanciare messaggi efficaci non occorre trincerarsi dietro ermetismi concettuali, l'immediatezza è strumento efficace e didatticamente utile a creare un interesse che porta poi ad interrogarsi sul contenuto della rappresentazione.
In alcune tele predominano simboli dell'immaginario infantile, giochi retrò, pattern decorativi che giocano sul filo della memoria, creando una sottile sospensione metafisica.
In altri i protagonisti provengono dal mondo dei manga giapponesi, e dei robot super eroi, che difendono il mondo dall'apocalisse, replicando la stoica abnegazione e spirito di sacrificio dei samurai, icone provenienti dalle visioni adolescenziali dell'autore che, come molti della sua generazione, ed in parte anche della mia, di un quindicennio più anziana, subì il fascino del Giappone, visto come una terra in grado di coniugare la tradizione con il futuro, la disciplina con un'eccentrica trasgressione.
Le opere selezionate per questa personale presso la Galleria Spazio 44, che conferma la sua caratteristica di operare scelte originali e non conformi, ha come titolo "Fake News", ed è una riflessione sulla fallacità e distorsione della comunicazione attraverso i media, sostanzialmente immutata nel tempo e nello spazio, ed oggi amplificata unicamente in virtù del progresso tecnologico e della comunicazione simultanea tramite web.
Facendo leva sul suo spirito di collezionista di oggetti di modernariato, passione che per molti versi ci accomuna, nel suo studio si trovano reperti dei decenni trascorsi davvero interessanti ed originali, Zakamoto ha trovato, nei mercati dell'usato e da privati, prime pagine d'epoca riferite ad avvenimenti tra i più significativi della storia del Novecento, il "secolo breve".
Queste prime pagine, tratte da eventi che spaziano dalla rivoluzione bolscevica, alla seconda guerra mondiale ed all'illusione nazifascista, anche con la sconfitta alle porte, di potere imporre un nuovo ordine, per passare alla ricostruzione ed al boom economico e chiudere con gli anni Sessanta e due esempi tra loro antitetici e contraddittori come l'avventura spaziale e l'insensata e tragica guerra del Vietnam, destinata a marchiare in negativo una generazione, vengono incorniciate non prima di essere dipinte da spiazzanti icone.
Queste ultime rappresentano personaggi dell'immaginario artistico, la Venere del Botticelli, culturale riferito alle avanguardie storiche, il grande poeta Majakovskij, del fumetto e dei videogiochi d'antan, come i robot giapponesi, Super Mario, l'Uomo Tigre, dell'esplorazione spaziale, Gagarin, del cinema, Apocalypse Now ed altri ancora, che stabiliscono un collegamento metaforico con la carta stampata, in sintonia con il sapiente gioco tra vari livelli, sempre tra loro collegati, della memoria, dell'immagine e della comunicazione, alla base dell'originale lavoro di Akira Zakamoto.
L'arte in generale è, da un po' di anni, considerata fenomeno "alla moda".
Complice un'euforia in buona parte artificiosa e determinata, a mio parere, principalmente dall'invasività , per certi aspetti anche benefica, di un apparato comunicativo che, sempre più famelico di argomenti da dibattere e divulgare, ha scoperto, da ultimo, anche l'arte come detentrice di una non trascurabile nicchia di interesse, in particolar modo quando si avvale degli strumenti retorici dello stupore e del sensazionalismo, come ben ha insegnato la sagace lezione di marketing della nuova arte inglese.
Questo "ritorno alla pittura" è figlio della stanchezza prodotta dagli anni '90, in parte perpetuatasi anche nel decennio successivo, con la loro ininterrotta sequela di trovate neo-concettuali banalmente citazioniste e sterili dal punto di vista linguistico.
In realtà la pittura, dopo un'evidente assenza dalla scena durata alcuni anni, dovuta alla fenomenologia di un'arte che aveva imposto gli ardori minimalisti ed analitici del Concettuale storico, è ritornata in forze sulla scena dopo la metà degli anni ‘70, dapprima in solitaria, dagli anni '80 in poi, fino ad oggi, in compagnia di altre modalità espressive che danno corpo all'eclettismo artistico contemporaneo.
Il tramite pittorico viene usato per stabilire con lo scenario contemporaneo un rapporto di evocazione, sublimando il reale per trarne i riposti umori, sfidando la fotografia e costringendola a adeguarsi rincorrendola sul suo terreno.
Quanto oggi appare parzialmente inedito e stimolante è l'attitudine a mescolare con disinvoltura tracce e visioni appartenenti di pari alla cultura "alta" ed a quella "bassa".
Brani di storia si mescolano a visioni psichedeliche e metropolitane, insieme a simboli appartenenti al repertorio tradizionale della pop art, così come alla moda all'illustrazione, al fumetto, creando una equilibrata miscellanea che sembra rinverdire i fasti dei migliori anni Ottanta, quando si manifestò la riscoperta dell'individualismo e la ricerca di un'estetica appagante in grado di contaminare i generi.
Il rapporto tra "arte pura" ed "arte applicata", nel corso del Novecento spesso sbilanciato a favore della seconda, pronta a carpire dalla prima le innovazioni linguistiche per adattarle alla cultura di massa, adesso pare posizionato su di un livello di perfetto equilibrio, con i due ambiti ad assumere la funzione di vasi comunicanti.
Questa vocazione ad un ‘arte "totale", rinvenibile anche in forme di grafica che tendono alla creazione di un linguaggio proprio, lontano dalle mode, con una grammatica ed un vocabolario originali, per riuscire a comunicare in un mondo già saturo di segni, in un design ecosostenibile, nella Street Art ed in particolari forme di artigianato artistico metropolitano, costituisca la novità più rilevante di questi ultimi anni.
Il lavoro di Akira Zakamoto, che colpevolmente non conoscevo, mi ha positivamente colpito per la sua capacità di sferrare dei duri colpi all'ipocrisia della società dello spettacolo e dell'immagine che caratterizza la nostra dimensione attuale, adoperando segni, simboli, oggetti ed inserti "vintage", si ascrive in pieno alla temperie prima descritta, a cui fornisce un contributo di notevole originalità .
Zakamoto, all'anagrafe Luca Motolese, ha una formazione di studi e di professione legata alla grafica pubblicitaria, al cinema ed alla comunicazione, tutte componenti rinvenibili in quella sapiente miscellanea di spunti visivi che sono le sue composizioni, quasi sempre pittoriche, con un sapiente uso delle tonalità e delle scale cromatiche, talvolta sfocianti nella tridimensione, con la realizzazione di opere ironicamente votive, ispirate sempre alla sua capacità di creare dei corto circuiti temporali tramite l'uso di ritagli dell'immaginario mediale o legati all'universo infantile, con la creazione di argute metafore che parlano della contemporaneità adoperando simboli ed icone del recente passato.
Ho visionato con grande interesse la produzione di Zakamoto, divisa in serie tra loro collegate da una precisa coerenza ideologica, solo in apparenza temperata dalla piacevolezza estetica della composizione.
Per lanciare messaggi efficaci non occorre trincerarsi dietro ermetismi concettuali, l'immediatezza è strumento efficace e didatticamente utile a creare un interesse che porta poi ad interrogarsi sul contenuto della rappresentazione.
In alcune tele predominano simboli dell'immaginario infantile, giochi retrò, pattern decorativi che giocano sul filo della memoria, creando una sottile sospensione metafisica.
In altri i protagonisti provengono dal mondo dei manga giapponesi, e dei robot super eroi, che difendono il mondo dall'apocalisse, replicando la stoica abnegazione e spirito di sacrificio dei samurai, icone provenienti dalle visioni adolescenziali dell'autore che, come molti della sua generazione, ed in parte anche della mia, di un quindicennio più anziana, subì il fascino del Giappone, visto come una terra in grado di coniugare la tradizione con il futuro, la disciplina con un'eccentrica trasgressione.
Le opere selezionate per questa personale presso la Galleria Spazio 44, che conferma la sua caratteristica di operare scelte originali e non conformi, ha come titolo "Fake News", ed è una riflessione sulla fallacità e distorsione della comunicazione attraverso i media, sostanzialmente immutata nel tempo e nello spazio, ed oggi amplificata unicamente in virtù del progresso tecnologico e della comunicazione simultanea tramite web.
Facendo leva sul suo spirito di collezionista di oggetti di modernariato, passione che per molti versi ci accomuna, nel suo studio si trovano reperti dei decenni trascorsi davvero interessanti ed originali, Zakamoto ha trovato, nei mercati dell'usato e da privati, prime pagine d'epoca riferite ad avvenimenti tra i più significativi della storia del Novecento, il "secolo breve".
Queste prime pagine, tratte da eventi che spaziano dalla rivoluzione bolscevica, alla seconda guerra mondiale ed all'illusione nazifascista, anche con la sconfitta alle porte, di potere imporre un nuovo ordine, per passare alla ricostruzione ed al boom economico e chiudere con gli anni Sessanta e due esempi tra loro antitetici e contraddittori come l'avventura spaziale e l'insensata e tragica guerra del Vietnam, destinata a marchiare in negativo una generazione, vengono incorniciate non prima di essere dipinte da spiazzanti icone.
Queste ultime rappresentano personaggi dell'immaginario artistico, la Venere del Botticelli, culturale riferito alle avanguardie storiche, il grande poeta Majakovskij, del fumetto e dei videogiochi d'antan, come i robot giapponesi, Super Mario, l'Uomo Tigre, dell'esplorazione spaziale, Gagarin, del cinema, Apocalypse Now ed altri ancora, che stabiliscono un collegamento metaforico con la carta stampata, in sintonia con il sapiente gioco tra vari livelli, sempre tra loro collegati, della memoria, dell'immagine e della comunicazione, alla base dell'originale lavoro di Akira Zakamoto.
Painting — as well as reproduction techniques akin to it on the plane of two-dimensionality and 'low definition,' such as graphics, comics and advertising images — has currently become a privileged instrument of artistic expression.
Art in general has, for some years now, been considered a 'fashionable' phenomenon. Aided by a largely artificial euphoria, determined, in my view, mainly by the invasiveness — in some respects also beneficial — of a communication apparatus that, ever more ravenous for topics to debate and broadcast, has lately discovered art too as the holder of a not-negligible niche of interest, especially when it employs the rhetorical tools of astonishment and sensationalism, as the shrewd marketing lesson of the new English art has well taught.
This 'return to painting' is the offspring of the weariness produced by the 1990s, partly perpetuated into the following decade, with their uninterrupted sequence of neo-conceptual gimmicks, banally citationist and sterile from a linguistic point of view. In reality painting, after an evident absence from the scene lasting some years — due to the phenomenology of an art that had imposed the minimalist and analytical ardours of historical Conceptualism — returned in force after the mid-1970s: at first alone, then from the 1980s onward, up to today, in the company of other expressive modes that give body to contemporary artistic eclecticism.
The pictorial medium is used to establish with the contemporary scenario a relationship of evocation, sublimating the real to draw out its hidden humours, challenging photography and forcing it to adapt by chasing it on its own ground. What today appears partly new and stimulating is the attitude of freely mixing traces and visions belonging equally to 'high' and 'low' culture. Passages of history mingle with psychedelic and metropolitan visions, together with symbols belonging to the traditional repertoire of pop art, as well as to fashion, illustration and comics, creating a balanced medley that seems to revive the splendours of the best 1980s, when the rediscovery of individualism and the search for a satisfying aesthetic able to contaminate genres manifested themselves.
The relationship between 'pure art' and 'applied art' — during the twentieth century often unbalanced in favour of the latter, ready to seize from the former its linguistic innovations to adapt them to mass culture — now seems positioned at a level of perfect balance, with the two fields taking on the function of communicating vessels. This vocation for a 'total' art — also found in forms of graphics that tend to create their own language, far from fashions, with an original grammar and vocabulary, in order to communicate in a world already saturated with signs; in eco-sustainable design, in Street Art and in particular forms of metropolitan artistic craftsmanship — constitutes the most relevant novelty of recent years.
The work of Akira Zakamoto, whom I culpably did not know, struck me positively for its ability to land hard blows on the hypocrisy of the society of spectacle and image that characterises our present dimension; using signs, symbols, objects and 'vintage' inserts, it fully belongs to the climate described above, to which it provides a contribution of considerable originality.
Zakamoto, by birth Luca Motolese, has a training and profession tied to advertising graphics, cinema and communication — all components found in that skilful medley of visual cues that are his compositions, almost always pictorial, with a skilful use of tonalities and chromatic scales, sometimes spilling into three dimensions, with the creation of ironically votive works, always inspired by his ability to create temporal short-circuits through the use of clippings from the media imaginary or tied to the childhood universe, with the creation of witty metaphors that speak of the contemporary by using symbols and icons of the recent past.
I viewed Zakamoto's output with great interest, divided into series linked by a precise ideological coherence, only apparently tempered by the aesthetic pleasantness of the composition. To launch effective messages there is no need to entrench oneself behind conceptual hermeticism; immediacy is an effective tool, didactically useful in creating an interest that then leads one to question the content of the representation. In some canvases symbols of the childhood imaginary predominate — retro toys, decorative patterns that play on the thread of memory, creating a subtle metaphysical suspension. In others the protagonists come from the world of Japanese manga and superhero robots that defend the world from the apocalypse, replicating the stoic self-denial and spirit of sacrifice of the samurai — icons from the author's adolescent visions who, like many of his generation, and partly of mine, fifteen years older, fell under the spell of Japan, seen as a land able to combine tradition with the future, discipline with an eccentric transgression.
The works selected for this solo show at Galleria Spazio 44 — which confirms its characteristic of making original, non-conformist choices — is titled 'Fake News,' and is a reflection on the fallacy and distortion of communication through the media, substantially unchanged in time and space, today amplified solely thanks to technological progress and simultaneous communication via the web.
Drawing on his spirit as a collector of vintage objects — a passion that in many ways unites us; in his studio one finds truly interesting and original artefacts of past decades — Zakamoto found, in second-hand markets and from private individuals, period front pages referring to some of the most significant events of twentieth-century history, the 'short century.' These front pages — drawn from events ranging from the Bolshevik revolution to the Second World War and the Nazi-Fascist illusion (even with defeat at the door) of being able to impose a new order, on to reconstruction and the economic boom, and closing with the 1960s and two antithetical, contradictory examples such as the space adventure and the senseless, tragic Vietnam War, destined to mark a generation negatively — are framed not before being painted over with disorienting icons. These represent figures of the artistic imaginary (Botticelli's Venus), the cultural one referring to the historical avant-gardes (the great poet Mayakovsky), comics and old video games (Japanese robots, Super Mario, Tiger Man), space exploration (Gagarin), cinema (Apocalypse Now) and more, establishing a metaphorical link with the printed page, in tune with the skilful interplay among various, always interconnected, levels of memory, image and communication that underlie Akira Zakamoto's original work.
Art in general has, for some years now, been considered a 'fashionable' phenomenon. Aided by a largely artificial euphoria, determined, in my view, mainly by the invasiveness — in some respects also beneficial — of a communication apparatus that, ever more ravenous for topics to debate and broadcast, has lately discovered art too as the holder of a not-negligible niche of interest, especially when it employs the rhetorical tools of astonishment and sensationalism, as the shrewd marketing lesson of the new English art has well taught.
This 'return to painting' is the offspring of the weariness produced by the 1990s, partly perpetuated into the following decade, with their uninterrupted sequence of neo-conceptual gimmicks, banally citationist and sterile from a linguistic point of view. In reality painting, after an evident absence from the scene lasting some years — due to the phenomenology of an art that had imposed the minimalist and analytical ardours of historical Conceptualism — returned in force after the mid-1970s: at first alone, then from the 1980s onward, up to today, in the company of other expressive modes that give body to contemporary artistic eclecticism.
The pictorial medium is used to establish with the contemporary scenario a relationship of evocation, sublimating the real to draw out its hidden humours, challenging photography and forcing it to adapt by chasing it on its own ground. What today appears partly new and stimulating is the attitude of freely mixing traces and visions belonging equally to 'high' and 'low' culture. Passages of history mingle with psychedelic and metropolitan visions, together with symbols belonging to the traditional repertoire of pop art, as well as to fashion, illustration and comics, creating a balanced medley that seems to revive the splendours of the best 1980s, when the rediscovery of individualism and the search for a satisfying aesthetic able to contaminate genres manifested themselves.
The relationship between 'pure art' and 'applied art' — during the twentieth century often unbalanced in favour of the latter, ready to seize from the former its linguistic innovations to adapt them to mass culture — now seems positioned at a level of perfect balance, with the two fields taking on the function of communicating vessels. This vocation for a 'total' art — also found in forms of graphics that tend to create their own language, far from fashions, with an original grammar and vocabulary, in order to communicate in a world already saturated with signs; in eco-sustainable design, in Street Art and in particular forms of metropolitan artistic craftsmanship — constitutes the most relevant novelty of recent years.
The work of Akira Zakamoto, whom I culpably did not know, struck me positively for its ability to land hard blows on the hypocrisy of the society of spectacle and image that characterises our present dimension; using signs, symbols, objects and 'vintage' inserts, it fully belongs to the climate described above, to which it provides a contribution of considerable originality.
Zakamoto, by birth Luca Motolese, has a training and profession tied to advertising graphics, cinema and communication — all components found in that skilful medley of visual cues that are his compositions, almost always pictorial, with a skilful use of tonalities and chromatic scales, sometimes spilling into three dimensions, with the creation of ironically votive works, always inspired by his ability to create temporal short-circuits through the use of clippings from the media imaginary or tied to the childhood universe, with the creation of witty metaphors that speak of the contemporary by using symbols and icons of the recent past.
I viewed Zakamoto's output with great interest, divided into series linked by a precise ideological coherence, only apparently tempered by the aesthetic pleasantness of the composition. To launch effective messages there is no need to entrench oneself behind conceptual hermeticism; immediacy is an effective tool, didactically useful in creating an interest that then leads one to question the content of the representation. In some canvases symbols of the childhood imaginary predominate — retro toys, decorative patterns that play on the thread of memory, creating a subtle metaphysical suspension. In others the protagonists come from the world of Japanese manga and superhero robots that defend the world from the apocalypse, replicating the stoic self-denial and spirit of sacrifice of the samurai — icons from the author's adolescent visions who, like many of his generation, and partly of mine, fifteen years older, fell under the spell of Japan, seen as a land able to combine tradition with the future, discipline with an eccentric transgression.
The works selected for this solo show at Galleria Spazio 44 — which confirms its characteristic of making original, non-conformist choices — is titled 'Fake News,' and is a reflection on the fallacy and distortion of communication through the media, substantially unchanged in time and space, today amplified solely thanks to technological progress and simultaneous communication via the web.
Drawing on his spirit as a collector of vintage objects — a passion that in many ways unites us; in his studio one finds truly interesting and original artefacts of past decades — Zakamoto found, in second-hand markets and from private individuals, period front pages referring to some of the most significant events of twentieth-century history, the 'short century.' These front pages — drawn from events ranging from the Bolshevik revolution to the Second World War and the Nazi-Fascist illusion (even with defeat at the door) of being able to impose a new order, on to reconstruction and the economic boom, and closing with the 1960s and two antithetical, contradictory examples such as the space adventure and the senseless, tragic Vietnam War, destined to mark a generation negatively — are framed not before being painted over with disorienting icons. These represent figures of the artistic imaginary (Botticelli's Venus), the cultural one referring to the historical avant-gardes (the great poet Mayakovsky), comics and old video games (Japanese robots, Super Mario, Tiger Man), space exploration (Gagarin), cinema (Apocalypse Now) and more, establishing a metaphorical link with the printed page, in tune with the skilful interplay among various, always interconnected, levels of memory, image and communication that underlie Akira Zakamoto's original work.