MICHELANGELO BASTIANI | DIORAMA

curated by Alessia Carlino

Opening Tuesday, December 13th – 6.30 p.m.

Emmeotto Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition of the Florentine artist Michelangelo Bastiani, entitled Diorama.
During the nineteenth century different artistic and illusory devices were constructed through a clever use of light. The Panorama, the Diorama, the Magic Lantern and the Dissolving Views, began competing with the spectacular and modern techniques used in the theater, but with the substantial difference of getting possible illusionistic systems in the figurative world of two-dimensional images.

In 1822 Daguerre and Buton showed for the first time to the public the Diorama that immediately became an international success. Unlike his earlier Panorama, this new and unique device is held on an illusionistic principle of optical box. The illusion was not born from the infinitude of the image, but from its transformations produced by changes of light.
Michelangelo Bastiani, through the use of contemporary hologram, retraces the footsteps of Daguerre and Buton. His work compares the viewer with kinetic images, forms of interactive illusion designed thanks a new and striking use of the latest technologies.

Bastiani focuses on nature, often his investigation leads him to recreate the effect of water in its ephemeral drifts, as when in the re - creation of a waterfall he tries to impress, through the motion sensors, the man passage.
The device enables to probe more strongly natural phenomena: in the series of holograms, the artist encloses, in glass jars, different climatic elements that capture the viewer in the vision of a realistic and coherent scenography.
Another key element of the Bastiani’s work is the realization of site specific installations. Again the artist experiences the effects of digital interactivity, the water is the privileged field of his investigation: an artificial lake comes to life inside a room and thanks to the digital technology, the viewer becomes an integral part of the work through the manipulation of images that allows an active interaction.

The confrontation between artifice and nature is the central node of art history: painters, sculptors, architects for centuries have created the world through the lens of their works, Michelangelo Bastiani accepts this challenge by regenerating the natural universe in the latest digital mechanisms, his works speak of a futuristic art process, where "with the advent of multimedia, the museum of the twenty-first century will become a place of permanent and collective cultural animation", a shared dream that will define the interpersonal relationship between the society and the contemporary artistic production.

Michelangelo Bastiani was born in Bibbiena (AR) in 1979. After getting his diploma at the Art Institute of Florence, he graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts with a major in Paintings and Photography under maestro Gustavo Giulietti. Today he works and lives in Tuscany. Career-wise he is praised for his exhibitions in both Italy and abroad. He had displayed his work in London, Frankfurt, Oslo, Rome, Kiev and Istanbul and in the United States in New York, at the Mana Contemporary Museum of Jersey City, at the Art Context New York, Houston Art Fair and at the Jim Kempner Gallery and C24 Gallery in Chelsea, New York. Bastiani’s work is composed of interactive video projections and hologram installations on led screens, concentrated on the theme of water. Since the beginning of his career, water has been the core of artistic investigation of this artist, willing to represent an art that always changes, that it is never the same, features that the element intrinsically carries with itself. Because of its dynamic nature, water has always been difficult to represent. The strategy to solve this problem is through technology which allows a tangible interaction, a direct connection with the viewer: a waterfall will never have a constant flow, but it changes according to the people passing in front of it, who become effectively a part of the kinetic process of the work. The natural is compared to the artificial; the strength of the elements finds its representation in an antithetic marriage. A marriage of imprisonment of nature caused by man, but at the same time an exaltation and necessity from one to the other.