Johan & Levi

In an era when questions are frequently raised about the rationale of certain visual representations and their real value, Stefano Pirovano responds by clarifying the nature of the link between the material component of the work and the elements invisible to the eye. The artwork has in fact expanded so far beyond its boundaries that it can no longer be confined solely to the physical dimension. It must have an accompanying narrative and information that introduces the public to the mystery of its image. According to the author, this is the approach taken by the most significant artists of the last few years. In this perspective, Forma e informazione presents an overview of the present-day panorama on the premise that abstraction is to be understood as the primordial driving force of the artwork. In order to elucidate the dialectic between object and information that animates contemporary abstraction, the author addresses a series of artists and particularly emblematic works. These include Carol Bove and Goshka Macuga, who develop relations between objects and knowledge, Cory Arcangel, Peter Coffin and Tomas Saraceno, with their forays into the technological culture, and Wade Guyton, Josh Smith and Beatriz Milhazes, whose images on canvas are generated by digital processes. The book alternates theoretical investigations, precise descriptions of works and statements by the artists involved. There are also numerous incursions into other fields, from design and architecture to physics, the neurosciences, philosophy and literature. Reference is made to scientists like Vilayanur Ramachandran and Brian Greene as well as writers like Orhan Pamuk, Sergei Nosov, Cormac McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis and Patrick McGrath, whose works are rife with mentions of contemporary art and offer effective interpretive stimuli. One final point: in its constant interweaving of creativity, theory and context, the book is not designed to arrive at any set destination but rather to present, also to the general reader, the riches of a territory with many still unexplored places.

Environmental emergencies, genetics, biodiversity and artificial nature: these themes are increasingly addressed and developed by artists in works that alternate investigation, protest, planning and utopia. Different issues and approaches with a common origin: the conviction that no aesthetic appraisal can be divorced from ethical responsibility with respect to scientific and technological research and knowledge of its effects on the natural and behavioural landscape that surrounds us. The scientific analysis of nature has enabled artists to enter into the dynamics of the environment we inhabit, make it their own and attain a position of greater awareness, abandoning the contemplation of nature that distinguished artistic production up to and indeed beyond the end of the 19th century. With the effectiveness and concision of contemporary visual language, artists today not only interpret problems that affect many but also tangibly present intangible scenarios otherwise known only to specialists. The book unfolds like an exhibition made up of a series of thematic stages, visual chapters that use a broad selection of images to combine investigation of the present and prefiguration of the future. Every chapter is enriched with a short anthology of first-hand evidence and writings by key figures juxtaposed with the views of scientists, writers, ethologists and art historians.

The 'analytical line' that emerged in artistic debate in the sixties led to a significant change in the role of photography, the consequences of which are still felt today. In those pivotal years, photography was emancipated from technical virtuosity for its own sake, and opened up to new conceptual practices. Finally legitimsed as art, it became the object of intense theoretical and linguistic analysis. Marinella Paderni starts out from this historical premise to document the work of artists who, from the mid nineties to the present, have metaphorically taken up the legacies of that conceptual season, forging continuity between the avant-garde movements of that period and today's currents in photography. Her analysis examines theoretical debates on the 'reinvention of the medium' and outlines the last two generations of contemporary Italian photography: a scenario that bears witness to the emergence of original visual practices and a multifaceted reflection on photographic language in the era of the dematerialisation of reality.

Contemporary art has made its way into numerous productive universes over the last few decades and art enterprises modelled on their ethical counterparts have sprung up all over Europe. The Dutch industrialist Akzo Nobel has created a foundation that hosts artists in residence. The French bank Neuflize OBC and the Belgian group Lhoist, a world producer of lime, commission works from contemporary photographers. The Italian TESECO group, specialized in the environmental treatment of waste, has created a workshop of contemporary art. The Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin was born as a joint venture between the Deutsche Bank and the Guggenheim Foundation. This interest in art is not, however, confined to major corporations but also affects small and medium-sized firms, and seldom takes the form of one-off sponsorships designed solely to bolster company image. Unlike the American model, which is more oriented towards consumption, the European appears to see art as an investment whose profit is to be found in the contribution made to the development of a sense of collective responsibility as regards the social environment and the assertion of cultural identity. This is an alliance that in turn works to the benefit of art, especially the art of today. Deeply convinced of this, Lisbonne and Zürcher start from the French model but work on the European scale to identify, country by country, sound entrepreneurial strategies and methods in support of projects, the commissioning of artworks and the creation of company collections and foundations. The authors highlight the ability of art, within corporate structures, to facilitate the expression of identity and convey cultural values capable of enriching the everyday life of personnel. As Pier Luigi Sacco points out in his preface, it is for all these reasons that contemporary art is not losing its appeal with the economic crisis but proves on the contrary capable in such circumstances of offering a salutary change of viewpoint, a way of looking at the facts of life through new eyes. Nor is it forgotten that “the art market, unlike the financial markets, handles works whose significance is not confined to the return they promise and that can indeed be regarded during a period of slump first of all as fraught with meaning, as opportunities to understand the world in which we live and even ourselves to some extent”.

In an age where ideologies and schools of thought have lost the capacity to forge strong cultural models, where national identities are gradually dissolving into a global context, and the distinctive characteristics of individual aesthetic languages faded out some time ago in favour of contamination, it is legitimate to ask whether we can still consider the contemporary period in terms of one single medium - in this case sculpture - within the boundaries of a specific national context. With these questions in mind, Alessandra Galasso explores the roots of contemporary sculpture in its many facets and declinations, traces its origines and presents the most recent work of the Italian artists engaged in this expressive genre. Her analysis commences from a historical perspective, embracing the entire sculpture tradition of the 20th century, and the radical changes that characterised it, then looks to the italian art panorama of the last decade, identifying original visual strategies and new interpretations of our complex reality. The thirty artists presented in Laboratorio italia - young italian sculptors, all share the awareness of combining old identities with new multicultural contexts, the practice of recovering traditional aesthetic canons with the desire to reinvent them from a new angle, and new materials. All the artists blend experimentation and tradition in their own ways, and combine their own personal stories with the Zeitgeist.

This volume is a double portrait of painters Zoran Mušič and Ida Barbarigo, depicting them from their first meeting in Trieste in spring 1944 until Mušič’s death in 2005. He was a Slovenian, born on the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a family of vintners, in a town whose name means a small hill. In 1944 he was over 30 and had already been to Venice and met Ida’s father, the painter Guido Cadorin (famous for the panels in the “Room of Pure Dreams” at D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale) by whom he was immediately fascinated. Ida was 20, she had always painted, and was enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. She was descended from the Cadorin, originally from Cadore, who owned one of the oldest sculpture workshops in Venice. Zoran’s exhibition in Trieste left her unimpressed and she was not at all attracted to the reserved young artist with kind eyes. But their lives, whose most significant moments are described on these pages, were destined to be forever intertwined: from their first meeting in Trieste to Mušič’s deportation to Dachau; from his return to Venice in a state of exhaustion, to his courting and then marrying Ida in 1949; from the early years of married life in Venice, a crossroads for many artists – Arturo Martini, Virgilio Guidi, de Chirico, De Pisis, Campigli – to the Paris period and the friendships, acquaintances, and relations with the Galerie de France.   Two lives devoted to painting and narrated in this book through a hundred unpublished photographs from the period.

Dominique Laugé is a well-known photographer in the advertising world. L’occhio incantato presents his latest production, his photographic quest in the ever-changing natural environment in search of lights and shadows that bring to life sea surfaces, glaciers, volcanic ashes, autumnal woods, flowery meadows. His works immediately remind of another famous photographer, Ansel Adams, but for Dominique Laugé the commitment is not limited to the photographic technique and the subjects to be portrayed, but spans to the medium to print his work on, the paper. For this series of pictures, Laugé selected a hand-made paper, produced in Sicily, especially fine-tuned so as to enhance the photos’ light and contrast; in the book, within the limits of industrial production, the publisher has paid particular attention to the paper so as to reproduce the same sensations given by original artworks.

Throught time, only few books have been devoted to Rome, as artists have always been in awe of the Ethernal City. As many other photographers, Mimmo Jodice waited many years before facing such a project, but his most recent works, especially the one on the myth of the Mediterranean, can be regarded as preparatory to the myth of Rome. Jodice’s eye spans from the ruins of the Ancient Rome to the Renaissance, Baroque and modern architectures, guiding us in a long journey through time and history. The book is a project commissioned by the publisher to Mimmo Jodice and is an independent publication with no connection to any exhibition or event. The volume includes texts by Richard Burdett, Centennial Professor in Architecture and Urbanism at the London School of Economics and currently chief adviser on architecture and urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics, and Cornelia Lauf, art historian and curator currently teaching at the faculty of Arts and Design at IUAV in Venice.

This work constitutes the first monograph on Miltos Manetas and focuses on his work of the period from 1997 to 2007, thus offering a point of reference for collectors and those involved in the world of art with an interest in the young artist. The array of illustrations provides an overview of his oeuvre, the large oil paintings on canvas with broad expanses of bright colour and marked chromatic contrast that confirm Manetas as an authentic modern painter.

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 gathers the diverse production of an artist of multiform skills: from the hand-sewn felt puppets (IllegalAliens) to his crochet works, from his big format pen drawings to his visual poetry. These pages contain an interview to the artist edited by Alessandra Galasso, an unpublished short story by Tatiana Carelli inspired by Aldo Lanzini’s works, and a rich iconographic apparatus. Aldo Lanziniwas born in Sondrio (Italy) in 1968. He studied at the Accademia di Brera in Milan and specialized in multimedia with a Master at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. His IllegalAliens have gained great success and have been reviewed on many international art and fashion magazines (Cosmopolitan, Elle, Flash Art, Vogue, Time Out New York) in Italy, France, Holland and United States.

Contemporary artists meet the challenge of producing artworks with every-day materials, tools and media; and videogames are among them. How can we make art with videogames? Miltos Manetas portrays the hardware and the players in his paintings; Todd Deutsch takes pictures of game players during exhausting contests; Tobias Bernstrup creates music performances and invents fabulous worlds; Eddo Stern builds fortresses and ships animated by videos; Jon Haddock uses game graphics to reproduce news items; Alison Mealey and Delire re-program the game so as to turn it into a sort of “automatic painting machine”. The book is a unique publication for his span (32 international artists, over 320 colour pictures) and in-depth analysis, the first reference book for all art expressions made with and on videogames, an attempt to free videogames from being “evil machines” and grant them a new recognition as cultural medium. The volume addresses the international public and devotes to the Italian readers a full translation of all critic texts.