Sergio Giuseppetti
New Monsters
Opening: Thursday 12th March 2015, 18.30
Exhibition: 13th March - 12th April 2015
Text curated by Sergio Giuseppetti and Giovanni Cozzi to whom this exhibition is dedicated.
28 Piazza di Pietra presents from the 12th of March to the 12th of April 2015 New Monsters, a personal exhibition by Sergio Giuseppetti.
Sergio Giuseppetti is a self-taught artist who attended in the 80s and 90s History of Modern and Contemporary Art courses at La Sapienza University and who studied the nude with Giulio Turcato at the Accademia di Belle Arti at via di Ripetta in Rome. His vast production, of expressionist drive and subtly political, evolves from the nudes of the years 2000-2005 to the series of the Desaparecidos and the ghost women Burka, alternating with the long series of "cows" to then land in 2007 with Autobomba and his more recent artworks of a street-art quality. Mixed media uses the language of oil, acrylic, tempera, of ink and spray, worked with density and layers, scratched, graffitied and sculpted in a vision of painting that is strongly texture-based.
Brilliant and isolated, of proletarian origins and excessively introverted, he naively never realized the true value of his art, around which a strong network of private collectors developed, through word of mouth, friends and acquaintances, all outside any critical and official commercial network.
In July 2012 he presents for the first time a critical selection of his work. Violently naive, compulsively tied to the strongest suggestions of topicality and news, spiritually heir and witness of a political era, the ’70s, strongly marked by the words and sounds of rock music, which his works are a continuous reference to. In this vision, metaphorically entitled “Hard Rock Painting”, under a seemingly rough and immediate form, lie layers and countless levels of signs and meanings; to the violence and the impact of color, used pictorially as the riff of Smoke on the Water, he overlaps the delicate web of Stairway to Heaven's arpeggio. The works exhibited on this occasion trace a path that starts from ten ghostly allegories of “Desaparecido” and "Sposa", a portrait of the bridal gown worn by the artist's wife, then undergoes a phase of large graffiti- mold canvases typical of recent years, and finally comes to the very recent, shocking and mature “Deep Pink”, dedicated to the ongoing tragedy of the growing phenomenon of violence against women.
Here at 28 Piazza di Pietra Giuseppetti presents a series of large fantastic portraits "New Monsters" once again a coherent allegory of the distortions of our civilization, by now rotting, which generates bodies transfigured by the need to satisfy inhumane and alienating necessities of social conformity.
The use of substances (medications, drugs, alcohol, etc.) deforms the psyche and the body of the "Mysterious Smoker" but it satisfies concerns and frustrations to himself unknown; the insatiable greed of bulimic accumulation of power, money, social prestige, reached not on the basis of merit values, but by the despicable shortcuts of cynicism, hypocrisy and opportunism, is the basis of the body deformation of “Fast Food” transformed into "monster" by the vulgarity and arrogance of power. The image of the “Sumo Wrestler” and the two "Videomostri" that slurp from the screen onto the hearts of the public unaware of the havoc in place, are a metaphor of the toxic effect of television on the critical consciousness of the viewer. The pregnant woman’s “Child soldier” is anthropomorphic being, half woman and half beast, as bestial will be the fate, already written, of the product of conception. Through the deformation of the bodies one can see the deformation of the soul (or vice versa): the tic, the mistakes, contradictions and horrors of human beings in a sick society in which each individual is constantly engaged in overcoming their own limits, until they reach the extreme limit of the inhuman.
On show are also a series of over one hundred works on paper entitled "Small Furry Animals", inspired by the famous Pink Floyd track " Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict" (Ummagumma - 1969).
Human-animal hybrids, exploring the edge of contiguity between human rationality and animal instinct, a condition that is indubitably extreme, yet a result of man's freedom of choice. In other words: mankind has the ability to achieve greatness, and art is proof of this, yet at the same time man is capable of executing not only acts of inconceivable and fierce violence, but also economic and political thoughts of dehumanizing effect which provoke a progressive brutalization of humanity itself. In this not so hypotetical decline, which from the sublime leads to the bestly, mankind runs the risk of appearing more and more like its animal ancestors.