There’s only one of Giacomo Giovannetti, but he could very well be many more. Born in Senigallia in 1983, the artist from Marche, over the years, has carried out his work based on interactions and exchanges with others. In his creative process, others are the foundational element. Sometimes in an active way, helping in the creation of the piece via workshops or other collaborative moments, or in a passive way, being on the receiving end of the message. But, for Giovannetti, having someone to interact with is the very reason for his work.
Created over the past year and never before shown to the public, the works on view at Fiuto Art Space take Giovannetti's reflections on the role of art as a relational tool in new directions. Each of the large paintings in this exhibition is the result of a “two-player game” involving the artist and his daughter Nina, who has been welcomed into the creative process as co-creator of the works. But it’s even more than that: Nina is like a muse and patroness. She has inspired the artist to free himself from all mental constructions, prompting him to experience the creation with a sense of wonder and primordial desire. Free to express emotions openly, removed from the judgment and conditioning of the system, the child takes the adult by the hand, opening the door to a world where everything is play.
Presented in elegant wooden frames, the pieces were created by Giovannetti using a process of overlapping, in both a technical and semantic sense. Newspaper clippings, bits from notebooks, and old photographs appear in the background along with the drawings by Nina: the little girl’s contributions are fragments of an imaginative, childlike world, but there are certainly frightening, unsettling elements as well. Monsters and shapeless figures emerge from the surface like nightmares that demand to be seen and interpreted.
Full of color and hidden meaning, the little girl’s contributions are featured under layers of plexiglass the artist added later. It’s the adult that makes his contribution here. These large transparent panels feature elements having to do with the adult world: maps of famous places and others to be discovered, pop-culture icons, insights, archetypal forms and signs produced by search-engine algorithms. Following this perspective of overlapping, breaking down and putting back together infinitely, each work by Giacomo Giovannetti appears as a collage – actually, a pastiche – that blends different sub-codes, registers, languages, and styles, representing an everyday at once intimate and universal: an enormous puzzle that, a bit like life, needs to be figured out. All the better if done together. All the better if there are two.