Federica Di Pietrantonio | THE GALLERY APART
My life as yours
08 jun 2020 – 18 sep 2020
The Gallery Apart is proud to announce its collaboration with the young Italian artist Federica Di Pietrantonio who, in these extraordinary times we are living, through her work my life as yours suggests a vision incredibly related to the changes underway, as it usually happens to young people.
The raw material that Federica Di Pietrantonio handles expertly and which is the result of her full knowledge and awareness is that tangle of feelings (frustration, melancholy, sadness, solitude) that Federica Di Pietrantonio tries to push away from herself vehemently by sacking that universe of simulation which is the virtual reality of the social platforms and of the videogames. The antidote that humanity injects into the society is the collectivization of the privacy, an oximoronic operation aimed at transforming the private space into a public one; an attitude that Federica Di Pietrantonio interprets not through voyeuristic or, even worse, narcissistic and self-referential mechanisms, but through the emergence of a narration that makes stories a means not an end, a product that crystallizes experiences and not a story that feeds on itself.
This explains why the stories told by Federica Di Pietrantonio stem from virtual platforms and experiences, and that’s the reason why nearly always they involve an avatar. Whether it is a machinima (machine cinema or machine animation), or installations or paintings, Federica Di Pietrantonio’s stories start from those places of virtual reality which offer her the possibility to proceed by translations, both when she exploits the most advanced technologies and when she returns to places of virtual archaeology (which for the artist have an aura of splendor and decadence), such as Second Life where her avatar Foxy lives, the inspiration of her series of paintings of the same name.
It is mainly in the painting, as in the great paintings on display in the exhibition, that the work of translation and transformation from the digital surface to the canvas manifests itself, that is from the virtual platforms from which her stories and her characters stem to the real surface of the canvas where, on the other hand, images assume an ideal value and therefore paradoxically virtual as it is universal. The private places of the artist are not only shared and made public but, through the utmost individual effort (by Federica Di Pietrantonio who does not hesitate to expose herself), the viewer receives a general message to introject and to translate once again.
Even when the medium is a machinima, Federica Di Pietrantonio acts by simulation extending an adolescent imaginary made of real people to the adult life and to the field of artistic expression. Through their digital alter ego, these people live in a world made not only of works, but also of interviews, presentations of exhibitions and poetics, creating a galaxy of participations and of artists that amplify the dimension of the work of art beyond the established borders of the bi/three-dimensional object or the art videos. The exhibition also features a live video shot in the spaces of the gallery through the webcam of a laptop by adding a virtual element to the scene to enable visitors to explore the work through a reverse path, that is transforming a public space into a private one.
Installations are a further expressive art technique through which the artist usually cancels the aesthetics of the objects, altering their use or, conversely, to give aesthetics to everyday objects. This is the case of the installation on display where two computer cases are emptied of their original function and communicating with each other in search of an almost personal relationship with the visitors who are encouraged to see more in the objects that they normally tend to overlook.
