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The Roman artist Alessandro Gianni decided to enter the world of crypto art and NFTs by dropping his first two works on Foundation. The works were immediately sold.
Who is Alessandro Gianni
Born in 1989, Alessandro has exhibited in Rome, Milan, Siena, Berlin, and Washington and Beijing.
His works are in museum collections including the He Art Museum in Foshan, designed by the great architect Tadao Ando. During the 73rd Venice Film Festival, he was art director of Enrico Ghezzi and Emiliano Montanari’s Ovalis project, in which cinema, philosophy, art and poetry are fused, and he participated in Greek painter Miltos Manetas’s ÑewPressionism, a movement that posits a totalizing perception of the material and the immaterial, the sensible and the supersensible, as its basis and brought together artists from around the world, including Sylvie Fleury, Petra Cortright, Jon Rafman and Amalia Ulman, in an exhibition at the Swiss Institute in Milan.
In his work, there are multiple references to very different artistic periods and contexts, starting from the obvious citations of the great masters of the Renaissance up to implicit aesthetic connections with artists of the 20th century, which are completely reabsorbed by his personal pictorial gesture. In fact, in his brushstrokes we can veiledly perceive emblematic artists such as Bacon, Blake, de Chirico, and Ernst, up to the more contemporary Baselitz and Mario Schifano, “cursed” painter and director of the 1960s, oscillating between Pop and Computer Art, between Rolling Stones and psychedelic music, on the wave of emotional involvement, resulting from a plurality of sensations, often simultaneous.
Alessandro Giannì’s canvas that will give its name to the 2019 exhibition at Albumarte is from 2014: The Apocalypse of the Hour, in which the “apocalypse” is a “revelation” of different realities made, more than of images, of visions, highlighted by a fiery red and an eerie leitmotif, dating back to a painting by Holbein the Younger (The Ambassadors, 1533): a slanted, foreshortened disk suspended over the floor, the anamorphosis of a skull, which, as is well known, in contemporary literature alluded to the transience of life, the inexorable passage of time.
Giannì’s artistic breakthrough comes with the solo exhibition Due to the Image, presented at Postmasters Gallery in New York, where the artist presents a new series of works created during the previous two years through the help of the Vasari AI, conceived by the artist and developed by the creative studio Unboolean. The software – which takes its name from Giorgio Vasari, a Florentine painter, architect and art historian of the late Renaissance (1511- 1574) – is able to create digital sketches, emulating the creative and conceptual process of Alessandro Giannì, who will later transform the digital images into paintings made in oil on canvas. The AI, learning from the artist’s imagery, finds images from the web, mixes and reinvents them, starting with inputs such as keywords, dimensions, colors, all at the edge of possibility, weaving connections between the digital universe and the introspective, emotional, “human” world.
On the other hand, as Breton stated in 1930, “There exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future. the communicable and the incommunicable. high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.”
Alessandro Gianni in the world of crypto art and NFTs
The approach becomes properly aesthetic in regard to the artist’s digital production, in his two NFTs, in which fascinating sensory features disorient, and bewilder, but, at the same time, by challenging one’s cognitive certainties, they provoke new ones: the observer becomes, therefore, a “creator,” actively participating in the “flow,” in the conceptual procedure of the artwork.
Thus, the 3-D sculptures visible as NFTs and already sold on foundation.app are the representation of the overcoming of that limit, in which analogy, any free association of thoughts and sensations floats like a magma, in which everything seems suspended: colors, psychedelic music, particles of images. His art (Synchronic Existence, Simul Existences, Simultaneity, etc.), in fact, “depends on the rhythm of the head,” on the flow, which is flowing densely, restlessly and vibrantly, and which, as such, tends to systematically involve every observer.
As mentioned, Alessandro has already sold his first two works in NFT form a few weeks ago using the crypto art platform Foundation and is preparing to create new ones soon.