Positioning himself somewhere between conceptual art, pop art and the new Dada, Vincenzo Gualano's artistic research switches from conventional painting on canvas or more unusual supports, such as tree bark, to complex compositions and installations of multiple objects and assembled materials that represent the artist’s skeptical point of view of contemporary living.
This young and yet highly experienced artist sets out to break the rules, contextualizing them, and then rewriting them completely. His career, in recent years, has been a continuous development of experiences increasingly targeted at the often "extreme" experimentation of new mediums and languages. Mindful of the lessons set out by the French surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp, Gualano takes on the daily contents of television media, or that which is published on the internet, and turns it on its head it, demonstrating the devastating effects they have on our everyday lives, especially those of the younger generations, or on human relationships and the critical sense of individuals. By elevating iconic symbols such as “likes” or “emojis” to an artistic level, he is effectively able to unmask the subtly coercive mechanisms of a communication system that manipulates those who use them into thinking that they are, in fact, the "protagonists". Gualano, too, identifies himself as part of that very system, but who is nevertheless committed through his art, to unpicking it, and bringing back the attention onto the individual, his identity and individuality. His work serves to illustrate and challenge the established dynamics of a society that would, instead, have us all become carbon-copies of one another, enslaved in a society of commercial consumerism and cultural conformity.
[Daniela Pronestì]