Alessandro Piangiamore
remnants of melted kerosene and beeswax candles, iron, two elements cm 203x113x3 each
Alessandro Piangiamore won the XVI Premio Cairo; his work "The XXI Wax of Rome" was judged the best with this motivation:
"A formally accomplished work, representing a concrete evolution of the pictorial device, with a skillful use of materials."
Born in 1976 in Enna. Lives and works in Rome.
Exhibitions include:
Springtime Piangiamore, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2014
Meteorite in the Garden, Fondazione Merz, Turin, 2014.
Fascinated by the idea of limit, Alessandro Piangiamore, through a multiplicity of languages ranging from sculpture to performance, represents elusive natural phenomena. Exemplary is the series of winds entitled Tutto il vento che c'è, begun in 2008 and still in progress, or La gravità dell'arcobaleno (2006), an overturned plaster cast of a puddle of water juxtaposed with a photograph of an iris, itself overturned.
The artist measures himself against physical laws while exploring the possibilities of archetypal forms, sometimes landing on impossible solutions, such as the ideal fall of the rainbow. In his work, visual paradoxes are generated between the apparent and the actual, between conceptual procedure and formal composition, between reality and imagination.
The work in the competition, titled The XXI Wax of Rome, is made by melting remnants of wax candles, recovered from churches in the Capital or from the homes of acquaintances. The form of a symbolic object, through a process of transformation of the material, is thus dissolved into a sculptural image with marked pictorial connotations. The material layering and the random expansion of color characterize an undefined geography, evoking, on both an aesthetic and semantic level, a ritual without celebration, almost sacrificing its original meaning.