OPR Gallery is thrilled to announce artist Carlo Zanni’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, accompanied by an extensive text by art historian and curator Pau Waelder. The show will be extended online with the presentation of a selection of video artworks by Zanni on the digital art platform Niio.art. This selection will be available to stream on any smart TV, smartphone, or tablet.
With two new bodies of works, Check Out Paintings and the internet performance Save me for later, Zanni continues his exploration of the relationship between individuals and the systems that shape our consumerist society.
Check Out Paintings is an ongoing series of canvases that seem monochromatic at first glance, but actually feature barely visible shapes in soft tones. Upon closer inspection, they reveal complex, layered compositions of geometric elements and text, meticulously drawn in pencil. Created in response to a period of isolation during the pandemic, in which e-commerce boomed and all social life forcibly took place online, Check Out Paintings take inspiration from the interfaces of the sites we visited to buy things from home. The artist has developed the functional layout of these pages to a point that can barely be recognized as such. The compositions no longer follow the logic of the interface, but gradually evolve into a visual language of their own, the buttons, drop-down menus, and disclaimers layered on top of each other, blending and even distorting their shapes.
While creating a space for meditation, the paintings constitute a critique of a society that freaks out over shortages of toilet paper, blindly invests in cryptocurrencies, and turns global crises such as climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the war in Ukraine into business opportunities.
The paintings reflect also on consumerism turned into a dull activity, whose meaning is blurred as it becomes part of a routinely cycle of dissatisfaction, aptly depicted in the software performance Save me for later (2022). Here a bot browsing amazon.com autonomously selects items and places them in the basket. When the basket reaches its limit, items are automatically moved to the “Saved for later” list.
This work connects, on the one hand, with Zanni’s exploration of the individual in a society shaped by digital media, questioning privacy and identity through portraiture, and on the other, with his conception of the computer interface as a landscape we stare at every day.
Through these artworks, Zanni presents us with spaces for pause and reflection, that do not intend to force a message into our pupils, but rather offer us the time to observe, to come closer, and let these landscapes unfold in front of us. Whereas the real interfaces of online shopping constantly nudge us into selecting, adding to cart, and checking out, the artworks created by Carlo Zanni let us patiently gaze at these processes that they simultaneously accept and decline.
Carlo Zanni is an Italian conceptual artist pioneer in the use of third-party Internet data and a painter. Born in La Spezia Italy, in 1975, Zanni works in a wide range of media including video, sound, animation, sculpture, AI, painting, photography, and installation. Since 1999 his practice has explored the public space of the web and the use of Internet data to create time-based ephemeral works that combine a pronounced social consciousness with a primary focus on privacy, identity, and the self. As a painter, he focuses his attention on a new kind of “shared landscape” that emerged with the Internet and that keeps transforming all human activities and relationships. He researches alternative selling models for digital art (ViBo) and he is the author of the book “Art in the Age of the Cloud”. Zanni has been the recipient of a Rhizome.org commission and he has shown in galleries and museums worldwide including: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Marsèlleria, Milan; Tent, Rotterdam; MAXXI, Rome; P.S.1, New York; Borusan Center, Istanbul; PERFORMA 09, NY and ICA, London. His work appears in more than 50 books and catalogs, as well as in hundreds of articles and interviews online.
Pau Waelder is an art historian and curator based in Spain. He holds a PhD in Information and Knowledge Society. Senior Curator at Niio.art and consulting lecturer at the Open University of Catalunya (UOC), he is also Editor and Advisor at the DAM Digital Art Museum (Berlin). He has curated numerous digital art exhibitions and has given lectures about his research and his work as curator in symposia and conferences at CCCB (Barcelona), KIASMA (Helsinki), Molior (Montreal), HeK, House of Electronic Arts (Basel), iMAL (Brussels), and Talking Galleries (Barcelona), among others. He is the author of the book “You Can Be A Wealthy/ Cash-Strapped Art Collector In The Digital Age” (Francoforte: Printer Fault Press, 2020).