POP FIVE .... in Trani at the ISMI Arte Contemporanea gallery.

Easypop together with prof. Guido Corazziari to the master Giancarlo Montuschi, Cisky and Gabriele Roberto Bertoni.
Curate her Paola De Benedictis
Presentation in the gallery by Michela Laporta
Text in the catalog of Isabella Michetti

text: by Isabella Michetti for ISMI Arte Contemporanea - June 2018

And it was the mass media and it was pop art the day after.
Born in the womb of the diffusion of new technologies, fed in the wake of the drifts of a phenomenon that has assumed unrealized proportions, it rides the visual input overload that characterizes our time and that sediments itself to form the common, bombastic cultural substratum.
Provocatory, irreverent pop art, indulges with ever greater audacity on the wave of a constant vocation to provoke. On the mouth and in the eyes of anyone, however, it escapes effective definitions; it moves and plays, mocking, along the uncertain margins that distinguish the stroke of genius from the mediocre idea, the authentic talent with the mere ability to replicate.
The increasing leveling of the perspective plans with which man observes the world slides everything in the foreground, on the same first floor - from consumer goods to the finest works of art, passing through the faces of billions of people daily with meals in social containers. The art enthusiast is downgraded to the consumer to seduce and ensnare with gimmicks to effect that can guide the tastes, so as to satisfy the vagaries of the market.
Just rework two advertising images in punk sauce and here is the masterpiece, say the pop art skeptics. So they say, on the other hand, his most enthusiastic admirers.
In our day, pop art is a tribute and a denial, a quotation and an overcoming of the pioneers. The face of that Warhol who could sense in a can of soup the same potential as the languid gaze of a Hollywood diva, that face has itself become an icon - earning the same treatment. Imperishable, it raises the distortions of the mass media society while it mocks itself. The speed of technological means, however, does not yet threaten the potential of painting, slow and thoughtful construction that allows one to linger on the individual phases of work, dedicating a suitable time to final improvement.
Surreal, nostalgic, in some ways primitive, pop art is a fairytale littered with characters of other times between the brushes of Giancarlo Montuschi, which a vaguely flirty animated duck joins the Beatles in colorful comic version, while an old jukebox re-reads sly their hit. The protagonists, the colors, bright and saturated by the generous spread, exploit the total absence of perspective implants to explode in every point of the canvas, filling the retinas.

Funny, witty pop art. Guido Corazziari, architect and professor of digital art, plays with the symbols of the most widespread consumer goods. In a bitten fast food sandwich, review the shape of the most famous brand of technological products; finishes the multimedia base with acrylic strokes, to further fix in color the heterogeneous miscellany of images and symbols - and it is now iPop.
It can be really easy, pop art. One can afford to mention, with respectful lightness, the great of modern art, reworking its masterpieces. It can be involved, under the aegis of pop, in a strictly open project - Easypop - different people and attitudes. You can renounce the individualism of the signature in favor of the easiest symbol there is - a smile big enough to become the final finishing touch of the work, a little bit of a trademark. Free irreverence in the regime of free use of every possible image.

They are just as pop as certain unnatural and extremely realistic portraits. Roberto Bertoni meticulously probes the faces, following the imperceptible folds of a barely mentioned grimace, the wrinkles of an insistent thought. The camera stops the instant on the film, but in its destiny there are pages of newspaper pages accompanied by enigmatic mottos. The result is a profoundly effective portraiture, as a tribute to Warhol but without being seduced by serial reproducibility. The brushstrokes soften the unnatural fixedness of the photographic shot, leaving essential features to emerge - like a mirror can become more faithful, with the increase in intensity with which it is fixed, the image of who reflects it.
Even the will to denounce injustice, the empathic closeness to those who suffer it can be pop. Cisky looks to the tragedy of the black continent, to the exploitation perpetrated against entire generations of unarmed peoples. Acrylics can amplify the spark of courageous unconsciousness in the eyes of two children, while they shine, on the head of a young woman with emaciated face and marked by discomfort, handfuls of rubies and diamonds on display as a sale by department stores. The sparkle of the rest seduces, glam undermines the idea of ​​beauty. And yet "nothing is born of diamonds"; from the trash, instead, pop art can be born.