What is art for the young Rome-based artist Giovanni Vetere - FB

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What is art for the young Rome-based artist Giovanni Vetere

What is art for you? A way of expression, a distraction, an outlet? Everyone has a different vision of art: that is what makes us unique.

What is also unique are the works of Giovanni Vetere, a young artist only twenty-one years old.

For Giovanni, art is about overcoming limits: for him, there are no rules, rather he prefers to establish his own in order to create something that is in a state of infinite transformation. His art is timeless, dynamic and characterised by processes that never stop. His performances are like theatre without a curtain, a continuous show that never has a definitive conclusion.

He started making art a few years ago when he left Rome and settled in London, turning his bedroom, a small room of a few square metres, into a darkroom for developing photographs taken around the city.

The process of analogue photography fascinated him so much that he applied to the London Academy of Art for access to a photography course. After a Skype interview Giovanni managed to get into the Academy, but soon after, he felt the need to explore different artistic disciplines, if only for the sheer pleasure of experimenting.

Experimenting for me is everything, I need to approach the artistic process through multiple disciplines. For me, a drawing, a photograph or a performance have the same value, they are connected to each other as if they were metaphor

Restless and exuberant, he was fascinated by sculpture, a fundamental choice for expressing ideas and thoughts. Giovanni was in search of matter and the third dimension, he needed to touch and feel materials, to be able to transform them by changing their origin, but looking at the sculptures he always perceived a void within them: they were still, static. Hence the idea of making his works dynamic through the body, a spontaneous decision that always stems from the same need for experimentation, a simple need to go further.

One of the aims of his art, visible through the work he proposed at this edition of the Florence Biennale, is precisely to emphasise the fusion between the object and the human body.

His performance No One is Looking at You is certainly something strange, an alienating and disturbing experience. In fact, its primary objective is to arouse emotions in the spectator, to make him experience the moment his eyes come into contact with the work in such a way that his memory remains with him.

There is neither a beginning nor an end, there is nothing to explain only an experience to be lived here and now, and if not now never again.

The work exhibited at the Florence Biennale consists of a metal structure, cubic and more than one and a half metres high. On the highest side we can find a canvas made of a double layer of nylon with a plastic one in between; lying on top of it is a person moving. The purpose of the performance is to make the person on top see everything, as if he were omniscient; on the contrary, no one sees him or can hear him.

My works must be absurd, they must go beyond the limits of the real and the natural.

Experience the blue and make yourself original by doing what you feel like doing and then you will be rewarded.

 

Aurora Bacchi and Soemi Turini

Liceo Scientifico e Linguistico Santa Marta, Florence

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