LIFE IMITATES ART MORE THAN IT
ART DOES NOT IMIT LIFE
I SAY
Art is a wonderful game. I’ve been playing it since I was a boy, when I used to make shapes with clay after the rain or drawing with whatever colour or material I could find. For my first communion, I asked for my first ever camera and then a video camera a few years later.
Even though I always find a reason to create new works, I am too critical of my own work to do something that I don’t believe in.
I love looking at reality through the eyes of a researcher, aware that everything can be represented on a human scale and made artificial or aged.
For me, art is a need to recreate anything that interests in me in a different and unbridled way.
Everything I do revolves around man, his obsessions and emotions, his technologies and vices, and his physical being, all interpreted with no restrictions of the ethical or political kind. Time, space, nature and the purely aesthetic studies also fascinate me.
I want spectators to be able to read the hidden messages in the stories my works tell. This means I don’t work in just one material or using just one technique, each story needs its own specific techniques and materials to be told.
Travel for me is a way of living and embracing diversity, a way of experiencing both the possible and the impossible and a channel for me to continually explore my nonconformity and eclecticism.
Aware of the fact that we can’t believe that everything is banal or nothing is funny, I used my more cynical side as an expedient to shake souls and attract people’s attention.
Through the eyes of a boy, then through the eyes of a wise old man, I can see an insect or an inhuman condition that touches of millions of people and then through videoart, painting, sculpture, installations or performances, I can use what I see to communicate with the world.
This is why I hate being cooped up in a cocoon with work upon identical work in identical styles. My spirit makes me feel and act like an eagle soaring up high seeking my prey and enjoying the conquest on catching it.
That’s why I like to call myself an “art reporter”: intolerant of mass culture and the way it forces on us predefined values, activities and structures, my way of doing things is probably to ensure that I am outside of this schema, ready to re-invent myself and explore new avenues all the time.
I think that the artistic creativeness acts as a spur for all other human activities which, in their turn, give the artist new boots, creating that virtuous cycle which is at the root of the civil progress.
OTHER PEOPLE SAY
The conceptualism underpinning Vincent Giannico’s object installations derives from the intense communication he develops with mundane items. The artist’s perspective is moulded by his creative joy, also applied in the fields of environmental actions, video art, photography and painting. His meditation of the image, enacted through a filter of reconsideration and requalification in terms of redeeming visual power, triggers the assertion of new iconicity not devoid of sociological commitment. In his work Giannico uses an object to spotlight a poetical idea and arrive at neo-conceptual constructs, generating provocation that may be ironic or disturbing or enigmatic. Here the actual illusory solution set forth symbolizes reality’s own alienation and dehumanization. Nuances produced by personal memory, daily accounts, technocratic spasms, scientific manipulations and the demands of obtuse consumerism, merge in his exploration of objects playing a role in the perplexities of our era. An era not so much of truth, therefore, as of crossbreeding, explaining the ambiguity incarnated by Giannico’s objects, where the artist himself is the manipulator of a crucial new Humanism addressing a hope for redemption.
MARIA CRISTINA RICCIARDI