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.

Ivan Quaroni draws upon an interview with the artist to trace her creative journey from the sculptural debut and the works on paper to the large paintings during the more recent stage of her career. Whether painted or sculpted Valeria Agosti Nelli’s skinny figures are the trademark of a unique style developed during years of disciplined work. The monograph closes with a short story by Milanese writer Roberto Piumini which evokes the atmospheres enclosed in Agosti Nelli’s works. Valeria Agosti Nellilives and works in Milan. Her works pivot on the theme of human fragility and instability. Her slender figures, drawn or sculpted, are the result of a profound research on the precariousness of human condition. Thanks to the use of delicate and ephemeral materials such as wood, wool and papier-mâché, the artist gives shape to a sensibility that is both fragile and strong, light and heavy.

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.