Alessandro Giannì

Galleria Mazzoli is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Alessandro Giannì, a Roman artist born in 1989 who practices a form of painting that combines technology with a commitment to traditional techniques: the work Alessandro Giannì has taken forward on his own for a number of years is also surprising for what comes prior to the making of a painting: the compositions he draws and then paints on the surfaces of his pieces are generated virtually thanks to personalized software that reworks data through artificial intelligence. What emerges is an intentionally unsystematic, unruly, extraordinary and above all unexpected mapping of many possible histories of art. It is necessary to write in the plural when we consider Alessandro Giannì’s research, because in his work the artist never advances along a nostalgic path of revival: in his case there are no resurgences of cultured painting, various types of citation or reworkings of the great history of art as ends in themselves, that history that appears and vanishes in manuals, which he knows well because he is first of all an impatient, compulsive observer. Giannì, taking his distance from these histories and these approaches, comprehends – like the contemporary man he is – the boundaries and spaces of action of art in our time, identifying artificial intelligence as part of a persistent debate around its uses and prospects in the various fields of life and knowledge.
“In a moment like the present, marked by a persistent and obsessive reliance on a painting of affects, emotions, emotional upheavals and apparent doldrums of dense and dusky interiors,
Alessandro Giannì brings a new breath of air to the recent history of Italian painting, without melancholy, without preludes on eras he has never lived, but with the awareness of a history and of cuts, fractures, earthquakes that belong to existence and therefore also to the perception human beings have and should have of the work of art. And the technology is never the ruler of a principle, but a means of expression, an apparatus the artist uses not to refuse responsibility for a choice, but to make us understand the extent to which those same images are a heritage to be rethought collectively, also with tools apparently foreign to the realm of art. Hence artificial intelligence becomes the filter through which Alessandro Giannì enters the guts of painting…”.
At the same time, the artist has come to grips with a basic question, which cannot go unobserved: in the history of the world only AI, and man himself, have the possibility of generating images. This takes us into a crucial issue of Gianni’s research: his work happens inside images, not outside of them. He enables us to understand how inescapable they are, but not in authorial terms, because he does not care if a head is by Michelangelo or Guercino, by Raphael or another cornerstone from the history of art, but that these heads, these bodies, these absolute anatomies are gestures, gazes, poses and movements that are an integral part of a collective memory that can absolutely not be violated. “I believe the Universe has already burned out, and in that same instant it is about to be born. I like to imagine it as an instant that regenerates infinitely, as if each time it could re-emerge from its own shadow. At times I imagine a world in which the works remain inside this flow, and in a part of their existence they have survived beyond the human being.”, declares the artist in conversation with Giuliana Benassi, introducing a trans-apocalyptic vision of the world of images.

Catalogue available. Written by Giuliana Benassi and Lorenzo Madaro.