ACME ArtBOARD #2: Duccio Guarneri
ACME ArtBOARD is a column created to bring the public closer and provide a new approach to contemporary art, involving young and emerging artists who, by telling each other about themselves, reveal their personal way of being Artists.
The medium used is a moodboard, a series of images joined together as in a collage that show in a visual format a project and all the elements related to it, anticipated by a short interview.
The artists have made themselves known starting from their studies and arriving to their future aspirations, creating a composition in which their creative ideas, the materials related to them and the tools of doing are shown. Each artist interprets the moodboard in an original and unique way, providing the reader with new scenarios useful to understand the meaning of being an Artist at 360 degrees.
Read more here.
The second article is dedicated to Duccio Guarneri.
ACME – What motivated you and why to start your studies/career as an artist?
DG – As a child I liked to draw: it’s a story you hear quite often. Despite flunking out in my first year of art high school, I have never lost my natural inclination towards artistic disciplines. Since I was a child my parents have transmitted to me the habit of observing, of lingering on the multiple languages of art: image, space, music, theater. For about ten years I have dedicated myself to acting and this practice has also influenced my research in the visual arts. After entering the Academy of Fine Arts and finishing a three years Bachelor’s degree course in Artistic Decoration, I wanted to choose another field of study, the one in Visual Arts, where I discovered new formal approaches and different forms of expression for my poetics.
In the meantime, growing up, studying, visiting exhibitions, I became more and more aware of the fact that to become a good artist one does not necessarily have to excel in a specific technique. Being an artist for me means having the urgency to tell a story, to shape its content through new forms.
ACME – What are your aspirations for the future?
DG – My aspirations for the future are mainly to keep alive, with the necessary means, my artistic activity that I have built so far, gradually evolving my research, doing everything possible to promote my work. In the near future I will work on finding a gallery to collaborate with and undertake the field of installations, a field that I already feel belongs to my style, because it particularly attracts me.
THE MOODBOARD
In this collage of images I tried to give space to the elements that constitute my visual language.
Compared to the materials I use, near the brushes and the rasp to sculpt, I have inserted a range of the colors used: natural pigments, especially soils, coal, ash and marble dust. The support that I prefer is the jute canvas, which helps to stand out the material in the paintings. For the sculptural works, I use plaster, clay and cement. The symbolic value of the material is a fundamental trait of my visual poetics, which addresses the themes of the pre-lieu, the dystopia of reality and death. In relation to this I feel influenced by the works of Anselm Kiefer, which together with those of Emilio Vedova have determined the development of thought from which my artistic research was born.
There are some places that exert a particular attraction on me and that are translated into a creative stimulus. Among them there is the city of Venice, with which I have a deep bond. It constitutes for me an important baggage of memories and first experiences in the field of artistic events.
Even music (in the picture a cover of a DJ Shadow album) plays a fundamental role during the work, especially the one without words, maybe because while I’m working I basically only need a rhythm. Finally, I wanted to quote a phrase by Friedrich Nietzsche: “What we find words for is often already dead in our hearts“, in which the author crystallizes the importance of moments when we are amazed and silenced in front of anything that deeply affects us.
Duccio Guarneri
Duccio Guarneri was born in Cremona in 1994. He lives and works between Cremona and Brescia. After graduating in Artistic Decoration at the Academy of Fine Arts SantaGiulia in Brescia, he is currently attending the last year of Contemporary Visual Arts Master degree course.
At this moment his visual poetic and work methods are strongly influenced by theater and scenography, on which he is researching right now. The recurring subject in his works is the scenery, which derives from the scenographic environment. Consequently, the dimensions of the action enlarges from the finished concept of the painting, creating a dimension where the spectator is invited to enjoy the work, like an audience transported on a stage.
The scenario he wants to explore through his work derives from the memory of a place, called by him pre-lieu. With this neologism he indicates the archetypal dimension of the rarefied and enveloping entity, fruit of the union between the figuration and the evanescence of the dream. Inside this dimension there are two elements, a proscenic and a scenic one, figure and landscape: they are two very distinct realities, each living in the universe of his work.
The immateriality of the pre-lieu is made tangible by the material with which it intervenes, a real element of connection between all the works, from those more linked to the staging to those less figurative and more dystopic. The use of raw materials such as coal, jute, paper, wood, ash and concrete, refers both to the space under construction and to its fading.