BIOGRAPHY
Born in Pescara, Italy, in 1981 to an Italian father and French mother, he spent his childhood between Italy and Moislains, a village in Upper France. He grew up inspired by his father, a painter and sculptor. A lover of technology, he explores contemporary languages through a transmedia approach, favouring the use of photographic and video mediums. He conceives his works as a response to the mechanical and suffocating aspects of society, driven by a desire for differentiation that aspires to a transcendent beauty. In 2015, "DIVIDED" came to light, an evolving project centered on contemporary visual culture. This project synthesises network media flows, urban aesthetic elements, and a fascination with the female figure into immersive and conceptual works. The artist appropriates error as a breaking point, intending to reclaim the human element by re-evaluating its aesthetic for a new harmony of forms and colours. His works have been recognised and shared by Maison Luigi Borbone, Fashion Art Wise, Rita Capuni, The Dummy's Tales, Victoria Torlonia, and Pierantonio Gaspari among others. In parallel, as a sound designer and selector, he is a prominent figure in clubs and at vernissages, performing DJ sets of electronic and experimental music with popular influences. He is deeply influenced by contemporary classical music in its hypnotic and contemplative forms. Simultaneously, the artist develops a poetic production where verses accompany the surrounding reality with a melancholic and poignant sensibility. Throughout the years, he has had several exhibitions, among them "Realtà seconda" (Second Reality) and "Una luce lenta" (A Slow Light), which, through non-rational figures, natural elements, and female presences, investigate the unexpected as a timeless source of creation. In his use of manipulations and alterations, his works adapt to non-secondary streams of consciousness, manifesting in harmony with echoes of past masters, from Rotella's décollage to the chromatic suggestions of Suprematism. As his practice consolidated, the artist has been focusing on direct photography and compositions characterised by geometric elements of pure colour, reflecting a necessary choice of reduction towards a more collected and intimate dimension. In his lines of light, black and white reveal themselves, merging the aesthetics of the past with an exploration of boundaries. An intention, a different path. Steps of a poetic and contemplative urgency, unveiling a movement of annihilation of the human, accomplished through being.
WORKS
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STATEMENT
I believe that the essence of humanity is held in imperfection and in art as a form of religiosity. In a surviving nature, in poverty of means, in a transmigrating feminine and linearly distant vision. I believe that the only awareness is the commonality between living beings, in a union where there is one single symptom, life, that cannot be detached from the whole. Now and again an expressive self-sufficiency seizes the gaze and in the absence of colour inhabits a manifest and heartening warmth. Poems like sequences of frames become the sharing of a journey, a required aesthetic pursuit of contemporaneity, in the urgent complexity of our time. I have learned that the coercive action on the system-induced release valves aggravates, even in the medium term, the wave of suffering. Confused by extremes and lost in the details, we are driven into a sadistic acceleration or a dysphoric dissociation. I want, I can. But do I exist? Castrated and surrendered to a hypnotic reduction of intellect, we normalise the disrespect, and enviously, we pathologise the genius of sensitivity, castrating in our turn. Fragments of glances in non-silent environments become, therefore, remnants of an unconscious and necessary past life, prelude to an art that does demand nothing of itself. Like matter stirred by the wind, I draw from a paternal faith, in a surreal dialogue, what I can and what other people, out of convenience, do not perceive. An endless alienation invades fields of meaning, conquering spheres and mashing up meanings. I strongly believe that the evolution of jouissance, confined in the misery of the immanent dimension, leads towards a perverse post-human abstraction. The artifice of pleasure is the authentic castration, resulting from a regression to basic structures of our intelligence. To be in the fullest sense. To consciously deal with the whole and avoid the trap of one's own idiotic self-interest. I realised that not anaesthetising suffering but sharing it intact can reconcile us, like children, with a sincere calm, in a dauntless place. To love union with the whole, without professing alienation, in a coherence that turns masks into uselessness. Re-establishing a transcended purity, a return to the primeval joys and to a nobility of species that honours us. I re-envision a life lived in the duration of values, in the linearity of sharp and blurred images, the wisdom of the essence of colour – in an awareness of the fact that knowledge will always be too vast when it is compared to the manifest of reality. I believe that the path becomes meaningful if there is a goal, and the ultimate goal is death, to ourselves. To embrace an evolution, to be beauty that prays for love. To be, human beings.
Giovanni D'Onofrio
PROJECTS
The DIVIDED Project
It is an elemental beauty presented to contemporary individual, which I believe can, however, be amplified, allowing the eye to perceive alterations. Whether it's an urban advertising element or an audiovisual inhabiting social networks, the works manifest a desire to transcend the normal understanding of 'seeing,' an attempt to perceive with attentive eyes what the visual message is or could be. In beams of light passing through bodies or in contaminating manipulations, in all these snapshots, I believe the true nature of society and its progression can be glimpsed. Can digital error, then, be a higher form of harmony, when contextualized within a polyform and dissociated present? The DIVIDED project took shape in 2015 with a manipulation effect applied to a female figure. From there on, the research spans contemporary visual culture, employing mixed techniques of style and narration. Within these multimedia works lies a journey that encounters the world of high fashion: passionate fragments of time, colour, and light integrate with the atmosphere of presented collections, giving birth to an alternative language. DIVIDED is a postmodern aesthetic research, embracing a mixture of states within a consciousness where non-isolated passages persist together. Inhabiting the present, in a movement that leans towards future communication, the project proposes a form of aesthetic freedom in the rebellion of geometries and colours. Signals of beauty participating in contemporary visual culture are translated into photographic works and video manipulations, into contaminations and collaborations, embracing and anticipating the innovative impulses of contemporaneity. Music participates in the works as an inner landscape: a fusion of visual arts, sound, and technology flows through the creations, translating aspects of society to express reality and contingency. The works articulate purity, alterations, critique, and fascination, in a search for an ultimate harmony, that does not threaten the surface but rather aims at illuminating the beauty of our fragile time.
POETRY
At one point everything is reduced
to where there are no points.
La promenade
(The walk)
Often, I don't know where to go.
So, from time to time, I follow others.
Do others follow someone?
And who then is the first to walk?
The wind blows on our burning souls.
Mon chat
(My cat)
I had a cat.
I met him on the road.
He was sick.
I approached him
and he trusted me.
I'll take him to my garden,
I thought immediately,
there are so many beautiful
neighbourhood cats.
He was calm in the paper bag
given by a stranger
to transport him by bike.
I remember his fatigue.
His head against the wall
almost to ignore me,
bumping against an olive tree,
discovering the garden.
Loved by my neighbour
and her son, from this
garden where many cats
came to see me in the evening,
he was the star.
We were friends for a day.
Citoyen du monde
(Citizen of the world)
I am a citizen of the world.
In every place the sun
warms my shoulders.
Water, brush my heart.
Wind, lead me where only you know.
Life life life,
my life.
Parfois
(Sometimes)
I don't know why
destiny sometimes
is so bitter.
One thing, only one thing
makes me light
before this endlessness.
Your gaze.
Solitudine
(Loneliness)
Images of the past,
become present.
Lives never lived,
make me nostalgic.
How can nothingness
make so much
noise?
Povertà
(Poverty)
Poverty.
Poverty of spirit.
Poverty of soul.
Poverty.
Poverty of heart.
Poverty of love.
Poverty.
Poverty by choice.
Poverty by coercion.
Poverty.
Only poverty.
La paura ha gli occhi chiari
(Fear has bright eyes)
Fear has bright eyes.
Far from myself,
I often meet her.
What do you want? I always ask her.
Embrace me,
make me feel alive.
Fear has bright eyes.
Ici dessous
(Here below)
If we stood here below
I would hold you close to me.
Darkness will be our friend.
Your hand on my chest
and cold feet,
I will protect you from the past
by dancing the silence.
Here below
everything will stop
and nothing will be necessary.
I will then look at you in the darkness
and the future will be as you wish.
Here below.
Le chiavi
(The keys)
The sound of keys
as I walk.
A cough.
This evening
the air is fragrant.
Where are you all going?
Nell'infinito presente
(In the infinite present)
In the infinite present
the future will not be,
because the past
has no memory.
Do you see that light?
It won't warm us.
That clock is
now too tired.
Trains cross the seas,
deserted highways
full of flowers. The song
of that bird?
It will have to be born.
Here the horizon
is that of time
and it is red.
Like your lips.
Ti sento
(I feel you)
I feel your breath,
I feel it. Your mouth.
Decision, uncertainty, anger,
your eyes see.
My gaze slides
on your skin.
I feel you.
Al mare
(At the sea)
If only you could count
the waves of this sea,
you would know
how many words
to describe
what I feel
seeing you laugh.
Vento e sabbia
(Wind and sand)
Wind, sand.
In this dark sky
I get lost.
Are you perhaps
that distant light
there in the sea?
The moon watches us.
Unghie
(Nails)
Your nails
scratch that glass
through which often
I looked at the world.
And they caress me.
Non ancora
(Not yet)
I see you in my
eyes, burning
with your colours.
My mouth
chews your
taste, and I
addicted to
your scent
flee, hating you.
La tenda
(The curtain)
The curtain,
which wants nothing
and demands nothing,
responds to action.
Senza titolo
(Untitled)
This perfect
line of lights
recalls
the monotony
of my thoughts.
Amore
(Love)
In vain I understood
the unease that divided us.
Walking in silence
I learned to laugh
with other eyes,
where we were.
Cause and consequence
of everything, I remain helpless.
I contemplate the unacceptable.
Divided atom,
incomplete infinity.
The same sky
has abandoned
our destiny.
My light falls
in the shadow of your eyes.
Come nel vento
(As in the wind)
Reduction of infinity,
happiness rediscovered,
unspoken malaise,
the search for causes
as a consequence.
Immobile detail.
Slaves of humanity
we accept
the shadow of colour.
Death, sand and light
create life.
In questo mondo
(In this world)
In this world
of cognitive dissonances
the linearity of the body
is dysfunctional.
Finite beings
we embrace infinity
by dying.
Di notte
(At night)
Life is often strange.
Do you see that light?
Throat, tonsils
I thought it would guide me,
it blinded me.
This darkness,
legs, ankles
that always scared me,
today warms me.
Right eye.
In extremes the truth
that we will not have.
Look, another
freight train.
L'artista
(The Artist)
The artist will starve,
the artist makes us despair.
Artist, times have changed,
artist, you must adapt.
Artist, we love you,
but artist, we can't help you.
The artist must sell,
the artist must strive.
The artist should no longer be helped,
the artist must thank us.
Artist, you've fallen ill,
artist, you'll get us caught.
Artist, you treated us badly,
artist, you have to heal yourself.
The artist must sell,
the artist must strive.
The artist should no longer be helped,
the artist must thank us.
If I had a house, artist,
I would surely let you stay.
Artist, your father also worked,
you shouldn't blame us now.
The artist must sell,
the artist must strive.
The artist should no longer be helped,
the artist must thank us.
Artist, you have no more money?
Artist, you must be resourceful.
Artist, they don't pay you?
Artist! It's you who can't get it right.
The artist must sell,
the artist must strive.
The artist should no longer be helped,
the artist must thank us.
An artist's life is shit,
artist, are you sure this is what you want to do?
Artist, get another job, do you have contacts?
Come on, artist, you must travel!
But the artist is an artist,
and so he stays and observes.
Because lying on the ground now,
he simply doesn't know what to do anymore.
Nella città
(In the City)
Lost in the city,
the fear of loneliness
envelops me.
Eternal love,
what will you be, tomorrow?
And you, who once
prayed for me,
who are you now?
Fatigue is my constant companion.
Unique, faithful.
"You must make it on your own",
said one who received help.
"We will find a way",
says one who is afraid
of not finding one:
my heart draws close to him.
A roar of a motorbike
cuts me off.
The victor demonstrates
his victory over the loser.
His woman hold him
close, proud of the
no longer useful progress.
This city does not exist.
Questa verità
(This Truth)
Goes through my eyes,
drips from my mouth.
It invades, bitter,
my entire frame.
It flows, necessary,
the senses savor it.
Slowly, it is lost in the ground,
with my last scent.
This truth
pierces my eyes.
I nostri colori
(Our Colours)
Of that light
our colours
kindle.
And you, from your darkness,
would seek to lead us,
blind?
Verifiche
(Proofs)
That which is,
cannot
not be.
CONTACT
Phone:
Email:
Saatchi Art gallery
Instagram profile
Thanks to
Francesca Razzi, Claudio Totoro ed Erminia Cardone.