Partners & Mucciaccia presents the solo exhibition of Gianni Piacentino with the major works from 1966 to the present day, following the artist’s well-received shows at Center d’Art Contemporain in Geneva (2013) and Prada Foundation in Milan (2015-2016). The exhibition is an exclusive opportunity to explore the practice of Gianni Piacentino, one of the most acclaimed and unique figures on the international art scene.
Gianni Piacentino constructed a contemporary vision of Futurism, combining Pop Art, Minimalism, technical precision, and an intuition about speed, art, and design. The exhibition tracks his career not in a strictly chronological order, but according to the point of view of the artist himself, choosing to display together past and recent works to emphasize elements of continuity in his works.
Partners & Mucciaccia, presents his most recent METALLIC works which are shown for the first time to the public in this occasion. Piacentino revisits in shapes, sizes and colours the monochrome of 1965 in metallic industrial colours, and TRANS-CHROME of the years 1966-67. The artist changes the colours through a special technique, with a transparent chrome finish that creates brand new iridescent brightness. These works show a sort of temporal shortcircuit between classicism and contemporaneity defined by Piacentino as “self-manierism”.
He works on colour as a concrete matter, incorporating his characteristic highly technological treatments and processes directly inspired by aesthetics and industrial processing. The result is an unusual virtuosity brightness, echoing the great masters of the past, the golden funds of Byzantine icons, the soft velvet of Titian, the reflections of the famous Vermeer pearl earring, which Piacentino reproduces in contemporary terms in the anonymous language of his works.
The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual monograph in Italian and English (Cambi editore), edited by Francesca Pola, whose cover was designed by the artist himself. The catalogue is a large critical anthology that retraces the uninterrupted international career of the artist articulated between drawings, projects, biographies and repertoire, historical outfits, catalogs, invitations and other documents of various kinds.
