Category: Art

Let It Be Love

A few years back, and for a while, I was having apocalyptic dreams of natural forces having the best of human kind. Tidal waves, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, you name it. Usually, the dream ended just as I was about to get hit by one element or another, so I could never really figure out how I would end up, so to speak. One day, I came across an online article about a bunch of people who climbed down into an active volcano. The piece was correlated with awesome pictures of the fiery cauldron, which ended up being the foundation for this piece. I then…

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Heresy and Investigation

I made these artworks that introduce this rant of mine around a time of great upheaval, relative shock and intense self-discovery that loosely began in the summer of 2015 and ended in March of 2018. I was on the island of Ibiza to continue filming footage for a fly-on-the-wall documentary idea that I had developed a few years earlier. One about the highs and lows of an ageing DJ with whom I had become very close friends with in and around 2008. In my eyes it was going to be a story about authenticity and integrity. Passion and struggle. A story about choices and how…

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Since my adolescent days, and more pronouncedly in my early teens I had real issues with fitting into the so-called norm of middle-class urban Italian culture. It could have been something that was due to my mixed cultural upbringing. Possibly it may have had something to do with some inscrutable and inherited information deeply buried into my DNA spiral. Or maybe, some other past life trait of that immortal part of me, we like to call soul. More likely, looking back it's a combination of all these three aspects in unison. Yet that said, right from early on I just couldn't help to resign myself…

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Hide & Seek

Now, where were we? Yes, this artwork. It's inspired by the unseen and a series of events that happened to me while I was living in Casa Corazon: a farmhouse in the heart of Ibiza between 2016 and 2017. This place had a spirit living in it. I felt it about two days in while staying in the main house. It was around 10pm on a dark winter's night. I was in my bedroom reading an amazing and rare encyclopedic book on the esoteric history of Ibiza. All of a sudden, I felt as well as saw the bed sheets move around suspiciously by my…

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Them dicks that rule your wick

While I was managing a summer rental villa in Ibiza between 2016 and 2017, a group of British women showed up for a weekend of debauchery and fun in the sun to celebrate one of them getting hitched. When they left, I asked one of them to leave me a very realistic penis mask as a souvenir. Because you just never know when you want to literally and not just figuratively look like a dick. Stupid jokes aside, I had wanted to make a digital print about secret societies for a while and had spent quite a long time searching and collecting high-res pictures of…

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That’s All Folks!

A while ago, I was following the Pizzagate news story that unfolded mainly over the web, intrigued and at the same time disgusted by its narrative and implications. It felt kind of weird how it kept surfacing linked to what seemed the most random events, such as the John Podesta emails leak and the failure of the Hillary Clinton campaign, as well as the suicides of musicians Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington and the beginning of the Jerry Epstein scandal which recently led to his mysterious death whilst detained in prison. To add more fuel to the fire, a movie came out starring Joaquin Phoenix intent…

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Crystal Lizzies

When I was about 12 years old and spending my summer holidays at my grandparents home in North England, a kid we played with, one with a difficult family background to say the least, was keen to summon evil forces via a ritual that involved peeling an orange in a certain way whilst standing in front of a mirror and reciting a pater nostrum prayer backwards. So, being the inquisitive type I still am, I tried it. More to prove this particularly fellow wrong than anything else, given there had been some childish beef between us. Back at my grandparents place, I waited until I…

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The Androemoticon State

I came across Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo's painting "The Fourth State" a few times in my life as part of my Art History studies, and though it is regarded as one of the most iconic paintings of the twentieth century, I never quite felt much appreciation for it despite its social meaning and craft. Nevertheless, I found a high-res scan of it on the web and stored it for "a rainy day kind of thing". In 2016, after having resisted the impulse to purchase a smart phone for years, mainly in fear of becoming one of so many Izombies you see everywhere, I finally buckled…

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Catch your Fire

Do you remember the ALS IBC or wait ALS The Ice Bucket Challenge? Whereby, celebrities and politicians started recording themselves whilst throwing buckets of ice water over their heads, which in turn spurred thousands or maybe even millions of people to join in the party to raise awareness of ALS or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and more importantly money to carefully selected charities who study and research this motor neuron degenerative disease in order to find a cure. Well, I personally thought it spelled out S-C-A-M from the word go. A mind control scheme including the potential fifteen minutes of fame syndrome most of us suffer…

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Handjobs

I had this idea back in college to somehow create a visual hand gestures vocabulary to describe the many hand signs and symbology of Italian culture. I had originally wanted to make small etchings, however aside from a few ink pen sketches it never took off and instead I extended the theme to be included in my "IncontriirtnocS" series: Twenty-three life-size portraits - charcoal on raw loose canvas - of friends captured in different body positions suggesting postural communication typical of Italian culture, which ended up being the fulcrum of my graduation thesis. A few years passed, yet once ideas are seeded they keep on…

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