2024-10-15 10:02:00
The work of a Calabrian artist was chosen selected from twenty talents. All the competing works on display until Sunday 20 October at the Permanente in Milan
Giuseppe Lo Schiavo with Neural self-portrait won the 23rd edition of the Cairo Prize for Contemporary Art. The publisher Urbano Cairo announced this on the evening of October 14th during the awards ceremony at the Palazzo della Permanente in Milan. The prize is a competition between twenty young artists selected by the editorial staff of the monthly «Arte» directed by Michele Bonuomo. The recognition went to Lo Schiavo «for his complex and rigorous work as a meeting point between artistic practice and scientific knowledge», we read in the motivation. The artist, 38 years old from Pizzo Calabro, graduated in architecture in Rome, lives between Milan and London. His works stand out for his experimentation with synthetic photography through which he creates dreamy and hyper-realistic landscapes.
Neural self-portrait it is an artificial and natural world at the same time seen from a window, but it aims to represent an internal state of mind. «Why did I paint from a window? Maybe because my father was a window maker and I am an architect. We watch everything from this window which I imagined to be a window of the Kyoto Palace – he says – where the famous protocol was signed, which was supposed to be a revolution for the world. But years later it seems to me that that protocol has lost meaning.” The work, however, is also a personal and generational “portrait”. «The goal I have set for myself is to frame our generation. I am 38 years old. Our generation seems unable to face great challenges such as war, pandemic, climate change. We can’t do anything, just watch and I think my work is meaning this. Art tries to tell, but it can’t do more. Today we have a reverberation of information, but we are unable to manage our strategy and this is why we do something copylet’s copy.” Lo Schiavo’s work is created on the computer. «Here there are perfect flowers in the foreground and a wave coming from afar and we can look at one thing or the other indifferently. The painting is created with computer-generated photographs.” In the foreground, however, you can see a bottle of detergent that the artist painted with writing Washing of the soul: 90% of bacteria are eliminated but it only solves 0.1% of your problems. The flowers are synthetic made in 3D with simulation software that has the opposite objective to Artificial Intelligence. Next to the work there is a panel with neurological data. «I tried to create a link with neuroscience. What you see is a sort of encephalogram that collects my reactions in five different frequencies in front of the painting.”
«The work of the Cairo Prize is fundamental in Italy for contemporary art and so is the monthly “Arte” that promotes it, a monthly magazine full of information that allows us to understand what is happening – says Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, since 2016 president of the award jury —. Here artists can operate on any medium because the prize acts as a sort of free commission. In Italy it is very difficult for young people to be recognized although since 2016 the ministry has also established support tools”. The jury that evaluated them was also composed of Luca Massimo Barbero of the Giorgio Cini Foundation; Ilaria Bonacossa, director of the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa; Bruno Corà, president of the Burri Città di Castello collection; Lorenzo Giusti, director of Gamec of Bergamo; Gianfranco Maraniello, director of the Modern and Contemporary Museum Center of the Municipality of Milan; Renata Cristina Mazzantini, director of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, as well as by the master Emilio Isgrò.
The promoter, Urbano Cairo, underlined in particular the quality of this year’s exhibition layout, “particularly well looked after”. The works of the twenty young artists will remain on display at the Permanente (with free entry) until 20 October, together with those of the previous winners: the first winner of the Cairo Prize was Luca Pignatelli, with Locomotive24 years ago. In all its editions, the prize has seen 430 artists pass through who «were able to show their talent and creativity – declared Cairo – Their success is demonstrated by the over 50 artists who, after having participated in the prize, had the possibility of exhibiting their works at the Venice Biennale”: this year too there are three of them present.
Finally, we remember the names of all the artists selected for the prize: in addition to the winner Giuseppe Lo Schiavo, Thomas Berra, Chiara Calore, Tomaso De Luca, Pietro Fachini, Emilio Gola, Giulia Maiorano, Giulia Mangoni, Pietro Moretti, Matteo Pizzolante, Aronne Pleuteri, Vera Portatadino, Carlo Alberto Rastelli, Marta Ravasi, Adelisa Selimbašić, Davide Serpetti, Arjan Shehaj, Luca Staccioli, Maddalena Tesser, Flaminia Veronesi. These are works, Bonuomo recalled, «created with a plurality of expressive devices: from the never-exhausted ones of painting and sculpture to others borrowed from continually evolving hypertechnologies and to be looked at without prejudice». A variety of languages that testifies to the current state of contemporary art research.
October 14, 2024 (changed October 15, 2024 | 12:02)
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