- CYBERSPACE (2011)
Cyberspace, one of the ten winning artworks of the European contest Research in Art, organized by Atomium Culture (Bruxelles), is a piece inspired by the concept of cybernetic space that the World Wide Web has contributed to create. Images, thoughts and words live in this subspace of the entire physical universe, codified by electrical impulses that build a parallel universe in which the real universe combines with the world of ideas, with fantasy and creativity and brings to life a space in which the world of ideas and our representation of the universe become physical, visible and transferable between people at a distance. The results of the scientific research that has brought to the creation of the World Wide Web intertwine with the possibilities of experiencing artworks: artworks too can now be reconstructed in cyberspace, leaving an artist’s studio and becoming a true object in this parallel world by means of Berners-Lee’s discovery and its implementation. Cyberspace is a piece conceived as a digital photograph of a cyber image of an art piece of mine that can be found on the World Wide Web. By taking a photograph of the image of an art piece of mine from my personal website juxtaposed to an excerpt of the HTML code that has allowed its upload on web, I wanted to create a relationship between the physical and the virtual world, paying homage to Berners-Lee’s invention and making once again real what now exists only virtually: an image of cyberspace.
- CINEMATOGRAPHY OF URBAN MADNESS (2009-2011)
Cinematography. Doubt. Folly. Rationality and irrationality merging across the background of the New York metropolitan area. Cinematography of Urban Madness is a project of artistic contamination and synthesis betweencinematographic and photographic narrative. Focusing his attention on the image seen as a film still, Italian artist Pietro Reviglio recreates fragments of an imaginary screenplay revolving around the figure of an artist and his studio, a New York interior in which alienation intertwines with folly and tension gives way to violence. The project combines elements of photography, video and writing, to unveil the dark side of the artistic practice, its places, subjects and objects, mixing cinematographic fiction with autobiographical material. Through contrasting narrative and image, and eliminating all cause and effect relations, Reviglio recreates the scrambled structure of distorted thought, investigating the very process of visual narrative and challenging its canons.
from the press release of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies exhibition (2011)
- THE WEIGHT OF TIME - 2010
Site specific installation for Gemine Muse 2010 at MAO - Museo d'Arte Orientale - Turin
Inspired by the ancient art of Chinese shadow theater, the series The Weight of Time explores the concept of Time, seen as both physical entity and historical measure of artistic merit. Physically related to the intensity of the gravitational field and therefore to the weight of objects, the passage of time is the physical process that destroys memory. Surviving such process is an artist’s final test of artistic merit: while most works of art vanish with passing time becoming shadows of memory, a few remain, chronicling the passage and existence of the artist and influencing the history of art. Playing with the physical process of shadow formation, The Weight of Time combines art, physics and history, underlining their interplay.
- RIEMANNIANA - 2009
Distortion, a key feature in photography, may not just arise from the choice of viewing angle, but also from the intrinsic geometrical difference between curved and flat surfaces, which makes it impossible to project spherical surfaces onto a plane conserving proportion. This effect is given by the different geometric properties of Riemannian and Euclidean surfaces: a sphere, unlike a bi-dimensional plane or a cylinder, is intrisically curved and its metric is fundamentally different from the metric of a Euclidean surface. In this series, the intrinsic difference between geometries is captured by photographing a spherical surface and finding that equidistant circles on it are no longer equidistant in the bi-dimensional flat space of the photographic image. This unveils the varied nature of space and how this affects our perception of visual structures embedded in it. IMAGES
- OMBRE CINETICHE - 2009
While shadows are pictorically well-defined objects, they are not physical objects since they are created by the absence of reflected photons from a region of space. However, the shadows projected by objects moving in space surprisingly follow the same laws of kinematics which real physical objects follow. Ombre Cinetiche explores this paradox. IMAGES
- THE ORANGE SERIES - 2009
Decomposing the visual narrative typical of a movie screenplay into still frames and rearrenging them into a polyptic multiplies the visual possible sequences, which depend on how the viewer's eye would move across the panels. With six still frames extracted from an imaginary slasher movie, one can obtain 720 different possible sequences. Different observers would therefore randomly pic one of these and experience different narratives depending on the chosen sequence. The experience becomes randomized and subjective, unlike a movie, where the choice is fixed and made by the director for the viewer. IMAGES
- THE DARK SERIES - 2009
Similar to clues in a crime novel, different images in a polyptych convey only partial information and acquire meaning only when put in context with the other images. Instead of creating a narrative, they become visual clues and call for a subjective explanation by the viewer which may or may not be the one intended by the artist, opening a polyptych up to a subjective multiplication of meanings. Physical objects within these images compel the observer to experience the scientific paradigm of observation, collection of evidence, analysis and conclusion, brindging between the practice of art and the practice of science. IMAGES
- PHYSIKAL PAINTINGS - 2009
Part of the Physika series, Physikal Paintings are visual experiments that aim at exploring the use of physics as a pictorial medium. Organized in tryptychs, these physikal paintings represent different moments of the same visual experiment and are thought as photographic installations. Using the interaction of photons with the different materials of simple objects and the consequent physical processes of reflection, refraction and absorption, these physikal paintings demonstrate how one can paint in the photographic space, using as medium physical particles. IMAGES
- TENSORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY - 2009
Part of the Physika series, Tensorial Photography is a visual experiment based on object deconstruction and rearrangement. In math, a tensor is a multilinear application that takes the components of different objects (vectors) and produces a new mathematical object in which these components are mixed and arranged differently. Applying this concept to photography, objects are decomposed and rearranged in the photographic space into a new image by using the processes of reflection and refraction. The final composition is therefore seen as the produce of a basic mathematical operation, a semi-random ensamble of scrambled elements rather than a well-ordered juxtaposition of objects typical of classical photography. IMAGES