ART CITIES:Milan-Gianni Piacentino at Fondazione Prada

Gianni Piacentino began constructing angular, metallic sculptures in the 1960s. Although his works bear a visual affinity to minimalist art, the sculptures are inspired by the artist’s interest in speed and industrial design. His metal sculptures feature sharp lines and sleek finishes, resembling prototypes or designs for machines such as cars, bikes, and flying devices, and are evocative of 1960s automobile design, which used color and line to convey speed and motion.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gianni Piacentino Archive

Gianni Piscentino showed his work for the first time at the exhibition “Arte Abitabile”, with Piero Gilardi and Michelangelo Pistoletto, in June 1966 at the Galleria Sperone in Turin and the December of the same year he has his first solo exhibition at the same Gallery. Since then his work has been shown extensively in Europe. Initially associated with the Arte Povera, he participated in the first exhibition of the movement at the gallery of Gian Enzo Sperone in Turin in 1966 and to the most important group shows of Arte Povera, in particular, “Arte Povera Piú Azioni Povera” at the former arsenal of Amalfi in 1968 – and then the overlooked exhibition “Prospect ‘68” at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Piacentino, however, has developed its own autonomous language disaffiliating himself from the group. The symbols or geometric forms of his earliest works (poles, triangulars, crosses, disks, trapezoids), make space at first to everyday objects (tables, portals, windows), and consequently, by the late ‘60s, his minimalist sculptures translate into aerodynamic shapes which tend more and more to celebrate the myth of speed and engines, the movement and dynamism of the machine. Working primarily in polyester-coated and painted wood, he maintained an unwavering commitment to manual skill and highly refined industrial materials. Piacentino’s research began in an artistic and cultural background characterized by an increasing detachment from the subjectivism which had animated Action Painting and Informalism, as well as by the development of a new visual language mixing the attention to pop and consumer imagery and the appreciation for both geometrical and primary forms. His work, however, did not embrace either of the dominant tendencies of those times: Pop art and Minimal art, but according to the original reading of his work provided in this exhibition, generated a dialectic process between the two. In order to research the terrain where these two currents converge, Piacentino turned to the world of velocity and transportation including cars, motorcycles and planes, all products of pop culture which, while not part of the realm of pure art, are expressions of industrial aesthetics. In this respect, the artist approaches the aerodynamic fantasies of many Californian artists: from Billy Al Bengston to Craig Kauffman, from John Mc Cracken to John Goode. His early minimal sculptures transformed themselves into new shapes that celebrate the idea of dynamism and speed, recalling the vehicles that inspired his projects: motorcycles, monocycles, automobiles, and planes. Creating these works with the same degree of care and attention to detail as the industry puts into the production of these machines, Giannu Piacentino brings the highest level of handcrafted technique to his perfectly finished forms. With or without wheels, free-standing or attached to the wall, his objects look like traces of an abandoned utopia. They may be metal-plated or finished in pearlescent automotive paints; they are accented by logos made from the artist’s own initials or by words related to flight and racing. His works are rich with psychological and intellectual references, making visual comprehension of space and the sublimation of everyday objects that occupy it strangely unfamiliar. Erasing distinctions between individuality and standardization; painting versus sculpture; and everyday objects versus art objects, these boundless objects are distillations of Piacentino’s lifelong disruption of the status quo.

Info: Curator: Germano Celant, Fondazione Prada, Largo Isarco 2, Milan, Duration: 7/11/15 -10/1/16, Days & Hours: Sun-Thu 11:00-19:00 Fri-Sat, 11:00-22:00, www.fondazioneprada.org