Ex Machina
exhibition by Angelo Demitri Morandini

"The reason I'm painting this way
is that I want to be a machine"
Andy Warhol *

Angelo Demitri Morandini art works deals with language, technology and interactions - social, personal or digital. It would therefore seem by a strange coincidence to meet him in the territory of automatic drawing, both made personally, trying to overcome the filters of rational thought, and made to execute by absurd machines, not at all technological, almost do-it-yourself constructions that seem to work for a miraculous balance of opposing forces, permitted and other obligatory movements.
In fact, the triangulation that constitutes Morandini's research is also found here, under completely different appearances. Language that is created automatically, a primitive technology machine that is able to produce formal "words" beyond the creator's control, a continuously calibrated interaction between an object that seems to think and an individual who does everything to eliminate the reflective character of his own personality.
What fascinates Morandini, in his almost scientific and laboratory approach to artistic practice, is to record a language that emerges spontaneously from the rash movements of an obsessive mechanical organism and in which it is possible to read, as in any human artistic production, an intentionality and to have an interpretative hold. The machine also tests our eye's ability to make sense of things. Conversely, the author, almost envious of the strange creatures he gave birth to, puts himself on the opposite shore and tries to draw by relying only on the empty materiality of his own body, as if it were a soulless automaton. Involuntary and mechanical element that exists in man versus human element that exists in the machine. Poetic, pathetic, dramatic machines; robotic creators, empty, metaphysical mannequins.
In both cases the results of these obsessive-compulsive, hysterical and masturbatory activities lead to artistic texts that can be interpreted, giving rise to a strange gap between uncontrolled production and reading of narratives that have no will. It is also strange that Andy Warhol, wanting to become an impersonal machine, gave rise to works that are actually very controlled, reproducible and anonymous as billboards, while these robot drawings sometimes, when lucky, manage to have the same expressiveness as Egon Schiele`s lines..

Gabriele Salvaterra, curator

*note quote : Andy Warhol , Art News 62, November 1963; Swenson 1963, p.26