In the interstitial territory between direct perception and technological mediation, a particularly fertile space for reflection opens up today that questions not only the mechanisms of representation, but its ontology. In an era characterized by what the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han would define as “hypertrophy of the visible,” the exponential multiplication of images does not necessarily correspond to an enhancement of vision, but rather to the paradox of blindness from overexposure. Attention – an increasingly rare resource in the contemporary cognitive economy – thus becomes a central element not only in the fruition but in the artistic production itself, configuring itself as a form of resistance and, simultaneously, as a critical device. It is no coincidence that Jacques Rancière has indicated in the “partition of the sensible” the privileged territory of the politics of aesthetics: redefining the coordinates of perception means, from this perspective, intervening directly in the processes through which our experience of the world is constituted, re-establishing hierarchies of value and selection mechanisms that the digital universe tends instead to level in the undifferentiated equivalence of flow.
AA.VV. “ATTENZIONE! quell’Arte che Viene che Va dalla fotografia”, INSTALLATION VIEW, courtesy Studio la Città, Verona
In this perspective, the exhibition “ATTENTION! that Art that Comes and Goes from photography,” curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio at Studio la Città in Verona, is configured as a multi-perspective investigation into the mechanisms of translation, transmission and transformation of the image. The artists involved – Nando Crippa, Loredana Di Lillo, Marco Palmieri, Giuseppe Stampone and Vedovamazzei – explore, each with their own methods but within a coherent conceptual constellation, the processes of migration and metamorphosis that characterize the image in the contemporary media ecosystem, exposing its frictions, short circuits and unexpressed potentialities.
AA.VV. “ATTENZIONE! quell’Arte che Viene che Va dalla fotografia”, INSTALLATION VIEW, courtesy Studio la Città, Verona
Particularly emblematic in this sense appears the Early Works series by Vedovamazzei, an artistic duo born in 1991 and composed of Maristella Scala (Naples, 1964) and Simeone Crispino (Frattaminore, 1962), which articulates a three-phase transmission process: historical pictorial works are shown, through photographic reproductions, to children between six and twelve years old; they reproduce them from memory on small sheets; finally, the artists “transcribe” their drawings on large canvases or translate them into sculptures. In this way, a sort of visual “telephone game” is created that questions both authorship and the mechanisms of memory and interpretation. The mediation of the childlike gaze, not yet fully disciplined by representative conventions, operates as a defamiliarization tool that allows the discovery of unexpected expressive potentialities in the original image. The distance that separates the starting work from its final reinterpretation thus becomes a generative space in which both transformations and persistences manifest themselves: what remains recognizable despite successive translations reveals something of the communicative essence of the image, of its ability to resist the transmission process while preserving a recognizable semantic core. In the two Rembrandt self-portraits reproduced according to this protocol shown in the exhibition, it is interesting to note the imperfect coincidence between the expressiveness of the face perceived by the child and the subsequent translation by Vedovamazzei. The artists’ work, inevitably, is not a mechanical enlargement of the child’s drawing, but an interpretation of its expressive synthesis through a re-reading based on a more complex visual language than the synthetic intuition of the original drawing. In this way, the filter of the child’s gaze becomes not a limitation but a resource, a tool for accessing a perceptual dimension that the adult eye, educated and therefore to some extent disciplined, tends to exclude.
AA.VV. “ATTENZIONE! quell’Arte che Viene che Va dalla fotografia”, INSTALLATION VIEW, courtesy Studio la Città, Verona
On another level, but in an equally critical direction with respect to the mechanisms of reproduction and circulation of images, moves the research of Giuseppe Stampone (Cluses, 1974). His works, created with the characteristic bic pen – an apparently anachronistic tool in the digital age – directly confront the imagery of the network, appropriating media iconographies to subject them to a process of reworking that is both technical and conceptual. The artist’s hand becomes an “intelligent photocopier”, as he defines himself, in a challenge to the mechanical reproduction modes that claims for the human not the uniqueness of the gesture but the intelligence of the process. His stratified compositions, the result of dozens of superimposed veils, return images of extraordinary visual density that, while approaching photographic precision, preserve the tactile quality and temporal dimension of drawing. The patient sedimentation of minimal signs thus contrasts with the instantaneity of digital reproduction, recovering that processual aspect that Walter Benjamin recognized as constitutive of the aura of the work. The political dimension deeply permeates Stampone’s work, manifesting itself in works of strong symbolic impact, such as the virtuosic miniaturized reinterpretation of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, where the iconography of the romantic shipwreck is actualized as an allegory of the contemporary Mediterranean tragedies. In the artist’s graphic works, the almost maniacal accuracy of the technical execution is not a solipsistic exercise, but an ethical necessity: the dilated time of manual creation becomes a resistance to capitalist acceleration, while the precision of detail calls the viewer to a responsibility of the gaze that translates into an invitation to political responsibility. Thus, a generative tension is established between the global dimension of the themes addressed and the radical singularity of the artistic gesture, in a short circuit that, recovering Pasolini’s lesson on the “force of the past,” articulates a critique of contemporaneity all the more effective the more rooted in a practice that escapes its dominant logic.
AA.VV. “ATTENZIONE! quell’Arte che Viene che Va dalla fotografia”, INSTALLATION VIEW, courtesy Studio la Città, Verona
No less significant appears the research of Loredana Di Lillo (Gioia del Colle, 1979), who with Life in War Color Palette operates a transfiguration of journalistic images of war into abstract geometric compositions. The artist extracts from news photographs published in international newspapers the dominant chromatic elements, transforming them into visual patterns that, despite their apparent abstraction, maintain an indissoluble link with the original referent. The work presents itself as an indivisible unit with the newspaper page that inspired it, creating a dialectical contrast between the violence represented in the documentary image and its translation into a formal language that at first glance appears neutral. This operation of abstraction, however, is not configured as removal or sublimation, but rather as an attempt to elaborate a different perceptual protocol that allows us to grasp, beyond the specific referentiality of the image, the deep structures of its visual organization and, by extension, of its emotional impact.
AA.VV. “ATTENZIONE! quell’Arte che Viene che Va dalla fotografia”, INSTALLATION VIEW, courtesy Studio la Città, Verona
The small terracottas, painted bas-reliefs and drawings by Nando Crippa (Merate, 1974) seem to move in the opposite direction, recovering an artisanal matrix and a reduced scale that stand in contrast to contemporary visual saturation. In this case too, however, the primary source is often constituted by media images isolated from their context and transfigured into a dimension that oscillates between metaphysics and magical realism. The artist operates a sort of melancholic minimalization in which objects and figures, extrapolated from the uninterrupted flow of visual information, find themselves frozen in an estranging static quality that reveals their intrinsic artificiality. The pose – a constitutive element of the photographic image – thus becomes an emblem of that condition of perpetual self-representation, isolated in a sort of existential void, that characterizes life in the age of social media.
AA.VV. “ATTENZIONE! quell’Arte che Viene che Va dalla fotografia”, INSTALLATION VIEW, courtesy Studio la Città, Verona
The exhibition path ends with Marco Palmieri (Naples, 1969), whose watercolors explore the legacy of Italian metaphysical modernism through a practice that is situated at the intersection of painting, photography, and architecture. His Homage to Carrà, de Chirico, Sironi, Morandi and the series Horizons and Paradigm propose a visual synthesis that, while using the technique of watercolor, deliberately evokes a photographic quality, thus questioning the status of truth of the image. Very important in Palmieri’s creative process is the artisanal dimension that precedes the pictorial execution: the artist creates meticulous three-dimensional models in his studio – small architectures, object compositions, minimal scenarios – which he subsequently photographs or directly translates into painting. This intermediate step sharpens the dialectic between construction and representation, between object and image, creating a space-time short circuit where painting is not reproduction of the real but translation of a simulacrum already constructed as a potential image. The miniaturization of spatial experience, with its perspectival alterations and scalar compressions, thus generates an effect of estrangement that reactivates the lesson of Italian metaphysics through a contemporary visual language. Palmieri seems to suggest that, in the post-truth era, the distinction between authentic and simulacrum progressively loses meaning in favor of a conception of the image as a territory of negotiation between different modes of seeing and inhabiting space, be it physical or represented.
AA.VV. “ATTENZIONE! quell’Arte che Viene che Va dalla fotografia”, INSTALLATION VIEW, courtesy Studio la Città, Verona
The exhibition path orchestrated by Di Pietrantonio is thus articulated as a constellation of practices that, despite their heterogeneity, converge in critically questioning the mechanisms of production, reproduction and fruition of the image in the contemporary media ecosystem. In this sense, the title of the exhibition – “ATTENTION!” – is configured not so much as an alert, but as an invitation to recover that attentive faculty that visual hypertrophy risks compromising. Paying attention means, from this perspective, resisting the undifferentiated equivalence of flow to re-establish hierarchies of value and modes of fruition that allow the image to preserve its critical potential and its ability to generate meaning. Ultimately, what the exhibition suggests is that in the era of digital reproducibility, the aura of the work no longer resides in its material uniqueness – now definitively compromised – but in the ability to activate perceptual protocols that transform the spectator from passive consumer to active interpreter. In this sense, attention is configured not only as a cognitive faculty but as a true ethical practice that, in the era of permanent acceleration, perhaps constitutes the most radical form of resistance.
Info:
ATTENZIONE! quell’Arte che Viene che Va dalla fotografia (ATTENTION! that Art that Comes and Goes from photography)
curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio
works by: Nando Crippa, Loredana Di Lillo, Marco Palmieri, Giuseppe Stampone e Vedovamazzei
29/03/2025 – 30/05/2025
Studio la Città
Lungadige Galtarossa 21, Verona
www.studiolacitta.it
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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