PINO DEODATO

The wide-ranging exhibition, exceptionally divided into two venues, features about eighty works that, like pieces of a large mosaic, retrace the last forty years of Deodato’s research–from the 1980s to the present–with a special focus on that moment in his career that marked the transition from painting to sculpture, the theme to which the exhibition at Galleria Il Milione is dedicated, to his most recent production, on display at Dep Art Gallery instead.

The exhibition itinerary, curated by Alberto Mattia Martini, highlights the author’s desire to ‘guide us along a narrative path through images’ finding, both in painting and in sculpture, the finest means to express himself.

Galleria Il Milione displays about fifty works organised in installations that juxtapose both pictorial–less recent–and sculptural–more current–works to which the artist has at times attributed the same title, emphasising how Deodato has, over the years, moved from one medium to another to tell the same ‘story’, further validating and investigating its concepts.

It is precisely the titles that play a fundamental role in the artist’s work, becoming an integral and necessary part of his artworks, on the one hand making them more evocative and on the other clearer in the message they carry

Mangiava le lucciole per vederci meglio, Un popolo di piante, Chiodo fisso are emblematic works of the author’s thought as he has always wanted to express profound ethical, aesthetic and philosophical issues that are close to contemporary man’s heart.

The Dep Art Gallery exhibits about thirty works made by the artist beginning in 2010. The upstairs space is dedicated in particular to one of Deodato’s iconic subjects, the ‘Biblioteche’, sometimes understood as a source of knowledge, sometimes represented as trenches behind which man hides. In these sculptures, the artist places his little character–recurring in most of his works–as he tries to gain possession of all human knowledge, in the belief that he can find Truth there, another theme to which the artist has long devoted himself.

On the lower floor, however, is an impressive installation entitled ‘Il Direttore d’Orchestra’: vases, or cups, of various shapes and sizes and with strong iconographic symbolism, seem to turn toward a ‘little man’ who conducts them like musical instruments.

Pino Deodato uses a language of extreme synthesis to reclaim the profound values that modern civilisation seems to have lost: ‘I try to deal with complex issues in a simple way,’ says the artist, ‘which is what art should do: make difficult topics accessible to everyone’.

Meaningful in this sense is the work ‘Vede lontano’, from which the exhibition takes its title, acting as a trait d’union between the two exhibition venues since both exhibit a version of it: ‘In the one, a man placed on top of a parallelepiped observes the world below him; in the other, he is suspended in the void while peering into a telescope-cone. A sort of privileged viewpoint from which to investigate and thus ponder contemporaneity’, the curator explains.

The exhibition is accompanied by two catalogues, published by the two galleries, with texts by Alberto Mattia Martini.