Francesco Di Tillo – OGGI COME OGGI
Curated by Lorenzo Canova and Piernicola Maria Di Iorio
30 November 2023 – 19 January 2024
Solo exhibition at Galeria Gino Marotta - Aratro, Molise University, Campobasso.
The solo exhibition OGGI COME OGGI (tr. Today Like Today) of Francesco Di Tillo investigates in depth the theme of the impossibility of human control over natural and historical events. The artist takes inspiration from earthquakes that actually occurred to investigate the limits of rationality when faced with uncontrollable phenomena.
From this point of view, the exhibition finds interesting comparisons with the research of other historical Land Art artists who, although with different languages, have addressed similar reflections. For example, Smithson’s installations from the 1960s which highlighted the unpredictability of natural processes or Azuma’s performances in the 1970s which focused on atmospheric calamities and catastrophes.
The exhibition, curated by Lorenzo Canova and Piernicola Maria Di Iorio, brings together a series of works from 2014 to today that operate on the macrologic on which the artist’s narrative focuses, the impossibility of control and free will on the part of the human being in relation to reality, history, the environment in which he lives and his relationship with nature.
In this conceptual and productive panorama, one of the recurring protagonists in research is the earthquake. Seismic movements, in fact, can be studied, but never predicted. They thus become an event that challenges man’s ability to adapt and control. Likewise, his action achieves the same stability as human society, having the ability to destroy cities and symbols associated with progress in a few seconds.
The Master Plan series, for example, inaugurated in 2014, is a work generated by the transfer of archive images to construct new landscapes that at times seem to evoke clouds of dust, commemorative monuments at other times. Another artwork is Ansu (2015-16), created through the manual removal of forty images from paper depicting the earthquake that occurred in Nepal in 2015.
Still on the same theme, there are also some important works created in 2022. The docu-film REMOTO – beyond any other reasonable doubt, the video Retratos, and the performative action Unstable Settlement, are part of the same project created in Chile thanks to the Italian Council, and promoted by Galeria Metropolitana in Santiago de Chile.
On a parallel but complementary side, the series of sculptures Mutatis Mutandis from 2019, the Eterna series from 2020 should be included. The latter, in a different way, address on a formal level the uncontrolled effort of life, its resilience, and of mysterious connection with nature, where the human being can take inspiration and reunite us to better incentivize his inability to control.
A ten-year artistic production, with a heterogeneous methodology, which is processed starting from a natural systemic torment: that of welcoming and transforming events, actions, phenomena in which the human being is challenged and put in crisis with respect to his environment, his culture , his own story.
Francesco Di Tillo’s research is consistent in pursuing the theme of unpredictability starting from concrete cases; the ability to blend conceptual rigor and the emotional impact of the contents makes this one of the most interesting exhibitions on the topic.
exhibition text by Lorenzo Canova and Piernicola di Iorio
