Ivan Quaroni

Laboratorio italia documents the generation of Italian painters which began working at the end of the nineties and the start of the new millenium, with the aim of showing how many things have changed in the space of a decade. The work of the new generations, precisely thanks to artists' daily use of the web, more often than not speaks in terms influenced by the new globalized culture. The themes, forms, styles and approaches of young Italian painters are not that far removed from those of other Western countries. In some way the advent of the internet has brought an end to genius loci, from an artistic point of view too, and has fostered the germination of a myriad of 'glocal' expressions, influenced as much by global as by local culture.

This monograph contains an interview to the artist edited by young critic Ivan Quaroni and a short story by Italian renowned writer Tiziano Scarpa. Thanks to a rich iconographic section, the book presents the voluminous works of this talented representative of the Videogame Art. For many years the Milanese artist Mauro Ceolinhas translated and rewritten images with a technique that is the evolution of traditional painting. Inspired by Pop Art aesthetics, Ceolin analyzes the amount of information surrounding us and selects a series of images to be visually filtered using the vectorial drawing technique. These subjects are taken from the ultra-realistic world of natural catastrophes, from the cybernetic and mass-media environment of videogames and music, from the visual reconstruction of the headquarters of worldwide multimedia majors such as Sony, Google, Oracle, and Intel and from the world of comics. Ceolin uses his deliberately flat style to underline the topicality of various genres often considered obsolete, like portraiture or landscape painting.

In this monograph, Ivan Quaroni, through an interview with the artist, documents her creative path from her debut with sculptures to her arrival at the large paintings of her latest phase of production. The filiform figures of Valeria Agosti Nelli, whether drawn or sculpted, are the hallmark of a unique style, matured through years of disciplined work. The volume reproduces the drawings and the works made using fragile and ephemeral materials such as paper, wood, wool and papier-mâché. The monograph is completed by an unpublished story by the great writer Roberto Piumini, evoking the suggestions of Agosti Nelli's works.