Giuseppe Lo Schiavo
Fine Art - Hahnemuhle, cm 135x190, EEG.
The work Self Neural Portrait was chosen by the jury “for the complex and rigorous work that stands as a meeting point between artistic practice and scientific knowledge, realizing a synthetic and innovative image in which the waves of the sea (the outer world) are counterpointed by those of the brain (the inner world), waves that are both ungovernable.”
The young artist won the €25,000 prize and his work becomes part of the Cairo Prize Collection.
Born in Vibo Valentia in 1986, he graduated in architecture from La Sapienza in Rome.
With the competing work Self Neural Portrait, the artist, also known as GLOS, offers us a demonstration of “synthetic photography,” that is, a technique that does not use the traditional camera but rather computer-based methods. We observe a rushing sea looming outside a wide-open window, threatening the domestic placidity of a windowsill on which are displayed a vase of white flowers, an enigmatic reflective sphere and, most importantly, an antibacterial “soulwash” soap, which ironically promises to cleanse us of all bacteria but leave our everyday problems untouched. In the artist's intentions, the work narrates the social anxiety and impossibility of coping with the challenges of the contemporary world, an impossibility to which we respond with resignation and ineffective strategies that have the sole purpose of detaching us from reality. Next to the work we then notice an electroencephalogram, created by Alberto Sanna, director of the Center for Advanced Technology Research at San Raffaele in Milan, and performed on the artist himself as he observes
the image he produced, thus suggesting a parallel between sea waves and brain waves, between the furious external world and the more elusive, but equally ungovernable, inner world.
Giulia Oglialoro