Finally i’ve found some time to post few shots from my last residency in Morocco: some incredible days spent at this wonderful place called IFITRY, on the Atlantic Ocean, 50 km from Essaouira.

Last year i did some experiments together with Arturo from 56FILI silkscreen studio: we printed on some random recycled and dirty cardboards from his room and then i painted over them, adding more and more layers. The result is this series that you can purchase at Galleria Varsi in Rome.
Just go on the shop page at http://galleriavarsi.it/

“Industrial Blue”, 65×45 cm, painting and silkscreen on recycled material,2017

“Double Trouble”, 65×45 cm, painting and silkscreen on recycled material, 2018

“Industrial Green” ,65×45 cm, painting and silkscreen on recycled material, 2017

“Nera Nuvola Elettrica”, 65×45 cm,painting and silkscreen on recycled material ,2017

“London Mass Surveillance” , 65×45 cm, painting and silkscreen on recycled material ,2018

“Conceptual Kid”, 65×45 cm, painting and silkscreen on recycled material ,2018

“L’Immortale”,mixed media on photography, 70×100 cm, 2018.

“La Cura”, mixed media on photography, 50×70 cm, 2018

“Mi Ami?”, mixed media on photography, 50×70 cm, 2018

” Esistenza Low-Cost”, mixed media on photography, 50×70 cm, 2018

“RUSPA La Macchina Per Fottere”, mixed media on photography, 50×70 cm, 2018

“Recipe For A Disaster” installation view

“Wake Up In The Morning” mixed media on paper, 2017

Untitled, mixed media on paper, 2018

untitled black and white sketches

the curator Pietro Rivasi chilling in front of my piece “Studio Per Leviathan”

GALLERIA D406 arte contemporanea presenta:
RECIPE FOR A DISASTER

mostra personale di FRANCESCO BARBIERI
Inaugurazione sabato 15 dicembre dalle ore 18
Studio fotografico Rolando Paolo Guerzoni,
via Castel Maraldo 45, Modena
Dal 15 dicembre 2018 al 3 febbraio 2019

Due anni dopo la collettiva “1984. Evoluzione e rigenerazione del writing” presso la Galleria Civica, Francesco Barbieri riporta a Modena le sue città, in grado di evocare un futuro distopico raccontando contemporaneamente una realtà già attuale, con una personale curata dalla galleria D406.
Nello studio del fotografo Rolando Paolo Guerzoni in piazza della Pomposa, viene presentata una selezione di opere che raccontano la poetica dell’artista pisano, che deve al suo passato di graffiti writer la capacità di raccontare la bellezza disperata e la magia “noire” delle metropoli.
I lavori esposti sono eterogenei per tecnica e dimensioni; dalle carte, un must assoluto per la linea curatoriale di D406, alle tele, passando per 4 dipinti della serie che rappresenta l’ultima evoluzione del percorso dell’artista realizzati su stampe fotografiche. Queste opere, presentate a Modena in anteprima assoluta, segnano un cambio di approccio radicale rispetto al passato, perché contestualizzano in modo puntuale le sue città immaginate, nel tempo e nello spazio.
“Ricette per un disastro” non si limita a raccontare una storia generica ed applicabile in ogni parte del mondo, ma è anche un presagio sulla realtà della nostra città, cui le foto di Cinzia Ascari, fanno riferimento.
Ritroviamo così i campi di Vaciglio, Via Morane e Santa Caterina, già scomparsi sulla carta, ma ancora verdissimi nella realtà, “finalmente” stuprati da monolitici monumenti alla folle corsa verso la definitiva disumanizzazione dello spazio pubblico. Opere che non solo ci fanno immaginare, ma ci mostrano vividamente un futuro già segnato, un incubo locale che assume, attraverso la sintesi del suo segno, un valore universale.

Pietro Rivasi

informazioni e visite
+39 327 1841147 | +39 335 6556980

installation view

“We Travel In The Night”, 70x 50 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2018

“Assalto”, 70×50 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2018

“Ministero Dell’ Amore”, 70×50 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2017

installation view

“Big Company Billboard”, 70×50 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2018

“Big Ball Of Dark Energy”, 100×70 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2018

“Post-verità”,100×70 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2018

“Eat, Work, Sleep”, 100×70 cm, mixed media on canvas

upcoming solo show in Milan

some random stuff from the last months i haven’t published yet

“The Art Of Travelling”, 50×70 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2018

“Vibrant”, mixed media on canvas, 2018

“L’uovo Del Mondo (Contenitore Di Umanità Industriali)”

Live Painting Performance 2018

Live Painting Performance 2018

“No Place For Space”, 100×70 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2017

“Dystopian Valley (Sea Of Love), 30×35 cm, mixed media on photography, 2018

some more paintings from the series “Paesaggi Mentali” from last year

“Il Vero Nemico”, 50×70 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2017

“Opposition Of Society”, 80×80 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2017

“Security Machine”, 80×80 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2017

“A Sense Of Paranoia”, 50×70 cm, mixed media on canvas, , 2017

“Distorsione Temporale”, 100×70 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2017

One month ago we opened the group show “Antitesi” at the Galleria La Linea, together with fellow artists Daniele Cestari and Massimo Gasperini. It was a special moment, also because for the very first time i showed my country-side paintings.

“Tellurico”, 50×70 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2018

“Respirare”, 50×70 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2018

“Transumanza”, 70×100 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2018.

“La Via Degli Antenati”, 50×70 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2018

“Tuscan Hillbilly”, 80×80 cm, tecnica mista su tela, 2018

“Ricerca Della Felicità”, , 50 x70 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2018.

“Far From Any Road”, 70×90 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2018

“La Memoria Delle Montagne”, mixed media on canvas, 35×50 cm, 2018

“Inesorabile”, 70×100 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2018

“Fille Du Vent”, mixed media on canvas, 70×100 cm, 2018.

installation view

ANTITESI
The exhibition is curated by Matteo Scuffiotti
june 2- june 24, 2018.
Galleria La Linea – Via Mazzini 21, Montalcino (SI)
Opening: june 2, 2018. H 18.00-21.00

Barbieri, Cestari and Gasperini are the three artists who dedicated their entire lives to the representation of the city.

A city which they investigated thoroughly, each one according to his own personal research and history, and which they expressed pictorially and graphically in the most varied approaches possible yet always with the ultimate aim of understanding its intimate essence.
Forget everything, or at least almost everything, as this exhibition named “Antithesis”, overturns completely the perspectives’ and the certainties of both the authors and their observers, in order to catapult them into an unexplored dimension: that of the rural countryside and the natural landscape.
The individual paths along which the three authors reach this specific juxtaposition are all inevitably very different from each other, but they all focus on incentives, questions and needs that we will discover, are absolutely complementary.
Francesco Barbieri feels that researching a rural landscape, its symbology and its aesthetic are fully complementary to his research on cities, since it is a real “representation through negation”: painting open and closed spaces in order to identify full spaces.
In fact, if the urban and metropolitan system is intended as the ultimate human contemporary experience (its symbology represents the present social and economic system), it appears inevitably in crisis (due to pollution, overbuilding, individual alienation and marginality) and it leads us to look for alternative experiences, social models of a distant past, which has an utopian value. By natural contrast this leads the rural context to become idealized when instead, in actual fact, it is the countryside itself that has changed, partly eroded and damaged from the very same metropolitan, ever ready to engulf rural areas at the borders of the suburbs or to pollute the agricultural economy with its industrial logic.
Daniele Cestari instead describes the rural landscape as if it was a city itself: in his works, nature itself becomes “architecture”. The mountains – like symbolic concrete flow – become buildings and all his paintings are real and actual descriptions of nature’s architecture: they are “natural cities”. The sky becomes the supreme director of a landscape that is constantly taking shape, where any human presence vanishes almost completely.
Lastly, Massimo Gasperini focuses his attention on the concepts of “limit” and “margin”, of the “known” and “unknown”.
According to the author, the word “countryside” is often employed to identify a natural landscape, one almost completely erased from our planet. The anthropic landscape, of which the cultural component prevaricates on the natural one, prevails over the countryside, seizing its basic structures, transforming them and making them no longer functional for the survival of the local organism.
The “continuous city” has moved forward inexorably, increasing its margins and swallowing up the free space, according to the theory of an ever expanding consumption of the land.
The series of works presented in this exhibition by the author aim to explore the conceptual dimension of the margin, intended as the border between these two systems: city and countryside counteract according to the terms of addition (the city that stratifies and embeds upon the countryside), of subtraction (the city which deprives the countryside of its vital territory) and of figuration (artifice against nature).
The general and abstract visions, where the urban landscape and the natural landscape alternate, on the edge of contrasts and dissonances, on the paradox of confronting macro-shapes, define themselves progressively as the optical axis line gains ground.
This approach coincides with the dominion of natural elements over artificial ones, which dematerialize themselves until becoming a reflex or a memory of a pre-existence or existence.
Gasperini works on margins because the margin is where the limit between the two different and opposite realities meet. Between the known and the unknown.
Against this – silent – backdrop, the inevitable contrast with the great paintings of the past, as facing the rural landscape, also and above all, means confronting art history itself and rising to meet the challenge of articulating ourselves in a contemporary and current form on this fundamental subject, with all the respect it deserves, yet no longer considering it a taboo.