Category: Society

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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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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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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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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AlieNation

Since I can remember I've always felt like an alien. Growing up with parents from two distinctively different cultures can do that to you. There was a time during my teenage years where I often felt out of place. I didn't feel neither fish nor fowl, so to speak. If I was in the UK people would say: "ah OK so you're Italian then! ". In Italy it was: "eh you are so British! ". It's all pretty harmless criticism, but my sensitivity was deeply attuned to certain feelings of alienation already, so little things like this forced me to deal with it and make…

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Killer Monkeys

This digital artwork was inspired by the combination of two visual references. One, cinematic. The other, editorial. There is a short clip from an excerpt dialogue in Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction", one whereby the character Jules - a hitman played by Samuel L. Jackson - is speaking over the phone to his boss Marcellus Wallace. "Shit negro, that's all you had to say!" He retorts, and hangs up the phone. Despite its banality, it held some fascination. While I was travelling on the underground I picked up one of those free no-news-papers that litter the carriages. Those toilet rolls whose only practical purpose is to…

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