Mattia Sugamiele, Luca Staccioli, Ambra Viviani
Nüwa city
Curated by Anna Vittoria Magagna
9th April– 31st May 2022
Opening: Saturday 9th April 2022, 18:00 p.m.
Paola Verrengia Gallery presents the group exhibition Nüwa City with the artists Mattia Sugamiele (Erice 1984), Luca Staccioli (Imperia 1988), Ambra Viviani (Naples 1993) and a variety of works ranging from painting to sculpture and video, curated by Anna Vittoria Magagna.
The exhibition’s title takes its name from the new capital city that will rise on Mars, located on the slope of a Martian cliff, and also from the Chinese divinity that built the whole humanity. With this denomination, the work of the artists in the exhibition considers the current central themes projecting them into the near future, with a series of works which investigate our present as well its history as a possibility of evolution and transformation, also exasperating so many paradoxes of our contemporary society.
Nüwa city does not deal with an imaginary built on science fiction parameters but it tells us about the story of dystopia, technology, the human condition, places of aggregation, massification, new cults, traditional stories handed down, pandemics, and renewed sustainability. Thus, we are not looking at a distant future, but rather at our contemporary world in which fractures and glimpses in an ever-changing landscape are deepened and explored, and eventually transformed into a new planet or a possible world where we will be ready to land.
Mattia Sugamiele focuses on themes related to technology. He is interested in our new connected lives, hybrid and dual between the digital and the real world. The Gates series, as the term itself suggests, opens up real digital portals, like windows that look out onto great iconic and cult places, which are digitally distorted and transformed into new and dystopian landscapes of the future.
The canvases layer digital paint together with the juxtaposition of oil color worked with an airbrush, resulting in a surface on which fluid territories, archipelagos, and earthy crusts appear and emerge to become synthetic worlds.
Luca Staccioli‘s works are conceived as narratives that investigate the limits of pre-established values and preconceptions, through the analysis of nomadic images that proliferate in new media and on the internet. The first image the artist focuses on, in the Checkout series, is the shopping cart, an icon of massification and consumerism, presented with bright pop colors that celebrate its aesthetic presence. The Familiar pics series seems, ideally, the portrait of the inhabitants of the new Martian world of Nüwa, with a representation that draws on a contemporary repertoire of images, videos, advertisements, tutorials, instructions for use, logos, and historical archive images. The resins of the media seem like fossils, memory casts of our world or belonging to an earlier earthly era.
Ambra Viviani focuses on narrative and the possibility of a plurality of facets between the real, the fictitious, and the magical. The sculptures in the exhibition are each bearing a story linked to literature, cults, rituals, and stories handed down. They are intended as magical amulets that can protect the visitor during this journey to a new world. The artist then focuses on the divine figure of Nüwa, which gives its name to the new Martian metropolis under construction, historically depicted with tentacles and tails that embrace and generate the entire humanity.
(Anna Vittoria Magagna)