Vesuvio Print

Being contemporary lies in under- standing the present without ever forgetting the past, building the future with capacity for innovation. Current art must know how to join appearance and material. The extra- ordinary technological progress of the last decades cannot have only a functional use, but enters into the daily artistic practice, offering unfo- reseeable potential and opportunities for expression. Andrea Chisesi is an artist who lives his time, which is today's time. He has refined sensibility and trained eye to decline the present by reading the past. He contaminates, merges images and techniques. He reads the story and tells it in his way. By his fusion between pictorial techniques and photographic image, Andrea Chisesi develops a seductive and original narrative. It is as if art history, the artistic capital of the past, can be reread by transferring it to the current urban contexts, in today's visual languages. This is how Andrea Chisesi's artworks are born, where the origin is in myth, in fable, in tale. But at the same time the myth is the driving force of events that drag on over time until today. The relationship can be explicit, when the artist uses a pre-image, a pre-text, which is an icon of the past. But the reference can also be less obvious, like a thin thread that links the final image of the painting to the many stories that preceded it, to the sym- bols, colors, shapes that generated it. And Andrea Chisesi’s artworks, forget- ting any reference to classical sculp- tures, explodes with a firework, which is the artifice of an image builder. Or he discovers new superheroes who have so much of the semi-gods of myth. Or he rereads road signs that pervade and modify the urban land- scape which the artist, in turn, conta- minates, destabilizing signs and fun- ctions. This is why Andrea Chisesi exhibition becomes an opportunity not only to host the works of an artist who nowadays, in Italy, is a reference point for new research, with solo exhibitions and participations in first-rate reviews, but also to propose an exhibition with strong contents, able to have educational values, to interest and involve last generations, precisely because of the current nature of his language. And all the critical testimonies dedicated to him have highlighted his extraordinary attractiveness, his ability to interpret the present.