Wunderkammern is pleased to present at its Milan venue in Via Nerino 2 the first Italian solo exhibition of Londoner artist D*Face entitled Silver Screen Eye-Cons.
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Silver Screen Eye-Cons is the title of the new exhibition proposed by Wunderkammern gallery in its Milan venue in Via Nerino 2, created by Londoner artist D*Face. The exhibition is curated by Giuseppe Pizzuto with a critical text by Silvano Manganaro, lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts of L’Aquila.
There are many different works featured in this unprecedented exhibition, including works depicting the iconic D*Dog, a character inspired by the Peanuts cartoon; the famous Digital Drawings, works in which the artist combines pencil drawing and digital screens; the HPMs (Hand Painted Multiples), that blend hand painting and screen printing; up to a unique and exclusive homage dedicated to cinema (Silver Screen). The protagonists are original posters of great Italian and Hollywood film classics that the artist has selected and hand-painted specifically to create a dialogue with our culture.
In fact, Silvano Manganaro writes “With the Silver Screen Eye-Cons exhibition at Wunderkammern, D*Face offers a wide range of his works and ideas, with some new elements. […] it should not be forgotten that it was the big screen that made D*Face what he is. In fact, it was the 1980s when a very young Dean was thunderstruck by Michael J. Fox‘s skateboard in Back to the Future, beginning a journey first into the world of skateboarding and then into the aesthetics of sticker art and street art. Perhaps this is also why D*Face felt the need to contaminate old movie posters; proposing, for the Milan exhibition, a selection of Hollywood and Italian film posters: from Django to Platoon, from Il padrino to La mosca, passing through Scarface and Klaus Kinski‘s Nosferatu. In these works D*Face’s characters, brands, and style contaminate the posters and appropriate and desecrate them, transforming them into “aPOPalyptic” visions, to use a term dear to him.”
And D*Face adds “Throughout the history of cinema, film has been used a method of escaping a reality. More-so today than ever, we are allowed to exist in alternate realities which can be endlessly rewatched and revisited – never letting us down because we know how they start and end. […] Are these classics really as good as we hold them up to be, or is it time to take off the rose tints for a better look?”
All the works in the exhibition are united by distancing themselves from and looking with disenchantment at the comforting representations offered by cinema and cartoons. With the hand-finished posters, the artist wanted to distort some of the most iconic images of the silver screen by defacing and contaminating them with his style of irreverent and dark tones and questioning our expectations. In contemporary society, cinema also often becomes a vehicle for idealized and stereotyped images of relationships and feelings, D*Face addresses this theme in his works in which he portrays characters caught in romantic attitudes. In the HPMs they take on the features of skeletons and zombies revealing the dysfunctionality of their relationships; in the Digital Drawings, on the other hand, the artist depicts “interrupted” embraces of couples in which one of the two subjects is made in pencil on paper while the absence of the other is evoked through a digital screen that glows evanescently.
Just like cinema, cartoons can also become a tool to escape from reality and take refuge in nostalgia for the reassuring world of childhood. With Animation Cel D*Face brings to life its most iconic character with a round face and winged ears. D*Dog is depicted in a variety of funny situations that draw on a series of clips D*Face made last year in collaboration with an animation studio.
Info
Curated by Giuseppe Pizzuto
Critical essay by Silvano Manganaro
Wunderkammern Milan, via Nerino 2
From 12 April to 13 May
From Monday to Saturday, 10am-2pm / 3pm-7pm
Partners
Media Partners: Artuu, Collater.al, FACE Magazine
Wine Partner: Masciarelli Tenute Agricole