20 May 2011

LUCID DREAMS. Cristiano Pintaldi at La Biennale di Venezia

LUCID DREAMS. Cristiano Pintaldi
Curated by Achille Bonito Oliva
Collateral Event of the 54th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia


From 4th June to 31st October 2011 Cristiano Pintaldi will be featured in a solo exhibition entitled LUCID DREAMS curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and organized by the Rome-based non-profit association Opera Rebis.

LUCID DREAMS, as part of the official program of collateral events in the 54th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, will be presented in the striking old industrial premises of the former shipbuilding yard at San Pietro di Castello, hosting for the first time a contemporary art exhibition.

Based on a selection of large-size paintings, to a large extend displayed for the first time, Cristiano Pintaldi will be presenting a highly elaborate study of our ability to define and perceive reality. The very name of the exhibition, LUCID DREAMS, refers to the artist's belief that the reality we belong to is a dream in which each individual is simultaneously the director and actor of his/her own film, creatively responsible for his/her own vision. In this respect, the tangible side of the world we live in is the result of approximately six billion different realities, equivalent to the number of viewpoints of the world's inhabitants. But these viewpoints are actually mediated through some shared reality: we all, in fact, acknowledge as real the univocal perspective created by the media, which generates a vision of reality filtered through a framework and re-proposed on a screen. In this way, each of us becomes aware of the existence of a twin level of perception, the level of individual reality generated by our own point of view and the level of shared reality, identical for everybody, proof that comes from media imagery itself.

This twin level of interpretation is the focal point of Pintaldi's research: on one hand, the choice of subjects in his paintings, images playing a significant part in shaping our collective psyche forged by the new global media from the 1950s to the present day, and, on the other, painting made of pixels, thus translating images into the distinctive perceptual code of video broadcasts.
The pictorial breakdown of subjects into uniform points, red-green-blue, allows us to simultaneously perceive both the form of the image-reality in its own proper colours and its inherent structure, in other words, a carefully balanced combination of RGB pixels. This double nature of vision is, therefore, generated by the work through colour as an anomalous experience of reality, arousing a form of perception in the onlooker which is constantly oscillating between the various levels of reality.


LUCID DREAMS is the first major review of Cristiano Pintaldi's work to be held in Venice, installed at the crossroads between the Arsenale and the Biennale Giardini in a striking old industrial setting used for the first time ever to host a contemporary art exhibition.

The exhibition is being promoted by Opera Rebis Cultural Association, a Rome-based non-profit organisation that supports and promotes contemporary art projects in unconventional spaces focusing on an ethical approach to art, and is being realized thanks to the financial support of BONATO Milano 1960.

LUCID DREAMS is accompanied by the publication of a monograph on Cristiano Pintaldi's work published by Silvana Editoriale.