• Gabriele Picco

TEARS’ SWIMMERS IN APNEA OVER THE END OF THE WORLD

With a series of paintings and a complex sculpture the artist created a stage of the absurd where lonely and deformed characters throw an allucinated look on the contemporary world.
Picco’s prolific imagination leads us where clouds weight tons and are suspended to cranes, as if they could fall from the sky and sink on earth. A man, maybe the last one standing, is crying for the end of the world, while colorful fish swim in his tears.

The stranded character with light bulbs in his head, the painter who portrays the flies’ fly and Google-man, the man of the web, with the body of the Michelin figure, the cubist face of the first Picasso and the latest trendy sneakers, all move in a landscape reminescent of Beckett.
The artist manages to mix images coming from different sources and to recreate performance-canvases and installations that, without painting, would only rely on the words of a visionary crazy man. In one man show, a human being manages to take a picture of himself in the future with a digital camera until portraying his own death.
There is a canvas where peculiar architects eat the palaces of a city which has just been planned: a disperate attempt at repossesing the urban space by man or a reminder of the recent international events of violence and destruction.
But Picco leaves us always with a little hope even facing the apocalypse: if in “the flag-maker” the american flag is melting, it’s not because Jasper Johns used bad materials, but because it is made of snow, a man in the landscape is smiling maybe because he will built a huge puppet or, as a new David Hammons, will sell it to the best bidder.

Hakinobu Miake