Giuseppe Lo Schiavo. Beyond Reality. Beyond Photography

Starting on Thursday, September 25th 2014, Burning Giraffe Art Gallery presents a solo show by artist Giuseppe Lo Schiavo (Vibo Valentia, 1986, lives and works in London, UK) entitled Beyond Reality. Beyond Photography. This is the second exhibition held at the new art space located in Via Eusebio Bava 8/a, right in the heart of Turin’s city center, and it follows in the intent of showcasing and promoting the work of young rising artists. The show is composed of three photographic projects, created by Lo Schiavo, that share clear references to the history of art, and, most precisely, to some of its most crucial periods in painting, and are also linked to one another by the artist’s desire of developing a creative approach aimed at surpassing its medium of expression: photography.
The Ad Vivum series was conceived as a voyage without space-time limitations; a bridge that binds the Masters of Flemish painting (Vermeer, Jan ven Eyck, Robert Campin, and also Tiziano and Antonello da Messina) with digital photography; a mixture of classical aesthetics and one of the most contemporary forms of expression. In these images, warm and cold lights, distributed and diffused over the subjects, coexist with one another, just as they did in Flemish portraiture. Sculptures of gentle shadows, still subjects. silent and smooth like marble.
The works that compose the series Levitation are characterized by an illusory composition which draws inspiration from the lesson of surrealist Master René Magritte. This photographs don’t depict reality, but illustrate an imaginary universe, fruit of the infinite potentialities of the subconscious stratus of the human mind. The use of black and white functions as a link between the pictorial past and a photographic present, giving birth to an hypothetical futuristic scenario traced by illusion.
The third photographic series, presented for the first time at Burning Giraffe Art Gallery, is entitled Art Currency and it develops itself as a provocative collection of portraits of great personalities of the art world (from Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons), which find their ideal support in a “bed” of real dollar and euro bills juxtaposed.

Giuseppe Lo Schiavo graduated in Architecture at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, with a specialization in Architectural 3d Visualization. The union of modern computer graphic and photography made it possible for him to create his experimentations. For the artist, the photographic apparatus is, first, the hand of the painter, and then, that of the photographer, ready to give form to his imagination, with the intention of freeing the photographic medium from reality. Giuseppe Lo Schiavo’s works have been exhibited in numerous shows in Museums and Galleries internationally, such as: Saathcy Gallery, London; Aperture Foundation, New York; MACA (Museum of Contemporary Art of Acri), Cosenza; Mixer Gallery, Istanbul, and other galleries in Rome and Munich.

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