15th Premio Cairo
Twenty works by twenty experienced Italian artists under forty, created specifically for the 15th edition of the Premio Cairo. Twenty works, which - for their quality, intensity and expressive diversity - well represent the moods and energies present in contemporary artistic research. And which the monthly magazine ARTE, on the strength of its authoritative judgement and constant verification of the novelties that cross art territories, has selected for a prize that confirms itself as one of the most eagerly awaited and representative in Italy today.
The works in the competition for the most part restore the energy that fuels ideas, languages and materials, outlining a new scenario in which the individuality of the artist is once again central rather than the ‘strategic’ adherence to a supposedly hegemonic trend or group. In this reaffirmation of the artist-individual, freed from pre-constituted ideologies that no longer adhere to reality, and who alone takes responsibility for the pleasure and risk of his choices, the language of art has become looser and more uninhibited, and the means of expression once again become instruments at the service of the hand that traces and the mind that thinks. It is in this happy dimension of reaffirmed freedom that the twenty artists, selected by the ARTE editorial staff, have given life to their works, different in their formal and expressive choices, yet identical in their vitality.
Selected artists
Selected artists: Paolo Amico, Salvatore Arancio, auroraMeccanica, Marco Basta, Valerio Berruti, Mattia Bosco, Sergio Breviario, Francesco Candeloro, Rä di Martino, Michael Fliri, Angelo Formica, Giulio Frigo, Debora Garritani, Giuseppe Gonella, Andrea Mastrovito, Ieva Petersone, Giusy Pirrotta, Alice Ronchi, Valentina Sommariva, Fabio Viale.
The Jury
Fabio Viale's victory, chosen from among 20 young people under 40, was decreed by the authoritative Cairo Prize jury, chaired by art critic Luca Beatrice and composed of Gabriella Belli, director of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Fabio Cavallucci, director of the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato, Claudia Dwek, Vice President Sotheby's Europe and President Sotheby's Italy, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, President of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Giorgio Verzotti, Artistic Director of ArteFiera in Bologna and Andrea Viliani, Director of Madre in Naples.
Il vincitore
Fabio Viale wins the 15th Cairo Prize with sculpture ‘La suprema’, 2014, white marble and pigments, 181x161x116 cm.
Born 1975 in Cuneo. Lives and works in Turin.
Exhibitions include: Assonanze/Dissonanze, Italian Cultural Institute, New York 2013, Primo piano d'artista, Museo del Novecento, Milan 2012.
Fabio Viale, vincitore del 15° Premio Cairo, Urbano Cairo, presidente della Cairo Editore e Michele Bonuomo, direttore dei mensili Arte e Antiquariato Foto Lorenzo Palmieri
White marble and pigments, 181x161x116 cm
Award-winning work
Fabio Viale's sculpture experiments with the possibilities of the material in a rigorous manner, he measures himself against tradition achieving disorienting and surprising results that demonstrate how the most extreme and improbable thought can be formalized. Marble, a medium and at the same time an idea, a heavy, severe material, as ancient as it is precious, becomes light, dynamic, ductile, as anonymous as an industrial by-product or a singular reproduction of great masterpieces.
Exemplary are the works in which the marble takes the form of a balloon, a paper airplane, a styrofoam skull and even a fully functioning boat. The sculpture The Supreme, two overlapping and enlarged colored marble boxes, is a monument to an everyday object reproduced in minute detail, on which are imprinted the marks from which the work's title is derived. A paradoxical image that creates a perceptual deception in the viewer because of the executive accuracy with which the artist repurposes the original material (wood). His is a mimetic procedure that through skill and very high technical control gives new qualities to marble consistent with its tradition of use.
Award citation
"The artist caught the jury's consensus in that his work, in addition to having an accomplished formal composition, uses one of the material-symbols of the Italian art tradition, while enacting a strong perceptual disorientation that engages and stimulates the empathy of the observer."