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REAL TIME
21-09 / 15-12-2024Human creative expression has always reckoned with the idea of timelines and of editing. Contrastingly, nature has never cared about this kind of taxonomy; it does not have consciousness of this, accepting that it has consciousness at all.
The idea at the core of this project was how to make these two realms communicate despite the fact that they have always been quite distant from each other, in conflict at times, and rarely, able
to engage in a “friendly” dialogue on equal terms.
The software Real Time has precisely the task of creating such a dialogue. Developed together with LIM, the Laboratory of Musical Informatics of the Statale University of Milan, it aspires to act as a super-consciousness that is tasked with the role of relating the natural acoustic landscape to the human process of writing scores.
How does all of this happen? It begins with a microphone recording that is read by the software which contains a pre-loaded track, a score, which then acts as if it were doing rhythm training exercises (e.g. solfeggio) in real time. When the software recognises that there is a sound in the acoustic environment, a noise that has a frequency close to a known one, then it uses this proximal note.
Differently from what one would expect, no pre-sampling or machine learning devices are employed to investigate the soundscape. In this sense, it is a software that denies itself.
In the gallery’s garden shed, I installed a sound sculpture that I called Joog Box. The word “Joog”derives from the Creole, and it means “noisy”, or “messy”. Thus, it matches the results returned by the real time software which also works within the sculpture, the content of which is related to the composers of the Venetian school. The object itself is made of super-mirrored steel.
It, therefore, mirrors the outer environment. With this work I wanted to further underline the visual relationship at the core of the work: the clash of anthropic culture with nature, which is here embodied by the dialogues of the trees, the garden, the lawn, the musical score, and the compositions contained within the various tracks.
(Alessio de Girolamo)
Curated by Manuela Lietti
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TRE
08-03 / 28-05-2024Since 2016, the work on “real-time” has evolved over various forms, culminating in a collaboration with the LIM (Department of Musical Informatics of the University of Milan) in 2023, which implements an interactive software called Real Time, which is aimed at fostering an immersive dialogue between the audience and the sound landscape.
The first presentation takes place at the Linea Project gallery spaces in Lecce, Italy.
Curated by Alice Caracciolo and Marco Vitale.exhibition link
The Fool Arcanum18–12–2021 / 26-02-2022The Fool, Arcanum is the first physical exhibition that Alessio de Girolamo dedicates to this project, composed of 22 redesigned and reinterpreted major arcana from the tarot. Created entirely in Athens between April and May 2021, the project reflects on the divinatory code as an alphabet.
Details in the crowded symbolism of the tarot are totemized on a musical score and aligned on a staff line.
(Ermanno Cristini)
Curated by Ermanno Cristini
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Arcanum03–11–2021Arcanum is an audiovisual code derived from the symbols used for the divinatory reading of the tarot “arcana.” Created on staff paper, the code magnifies and simplifies the rich details of historic
tarot cards, presenting twenty-two images which are “constructed” on a musical staff and made up of corresponding chords of three notes each, which can be listened to online in succession.
Continuing my work with alphabets and numbers, here I explore the arcane code of the tarot, transforming visual details into fundamental structures that are scaled up to fill the entire staff paper, sometimes producing Escher-like figures. For the composition, I drew inspiration not only from the divinatory art of tarot, but also from Aleksandr Nikolayevich Scriabin and his “mystic” chord: a succession of notes conceived by the Russian composer and pianist both as a harmonic foundation and as a key to reading the Divine in the symphonic poem Prometheus: The Poem of Fire. By sampling the wind, the quintessential invisible element, I synthesized a digital instrument similar to an organ with which I performed the soundtrack.
(Alessio de Girolamo)
Curated by Daniele Perra.
Text by Federico Pazzagli for Exibart magazine.
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Atlantis (SCIC / FENDI) 28–09–2020 / 10-10-2020
On the occasion of Milan Design City 2020, SCIC renews its close collaboration between the best artists of the contemporary Italian scene and the world of design, presenting the exhibition Atlantis
by Alessio de Girolamo. The SCIC project, curated by Irene Biolchini, carries forward an ideal of innovative contamination starting from 2019 when the design company launched a national concept to invite the best Italian artists to dialogue with the creative heights of contemporary furniture design.
To create a massive wall-painting, Alessio de Girolamo erased for three days the lines of an impossible staff, a mental space on a physical surface, a place haunted by the ghosts of infesting parrots. The parrots that took over Milan; the same ones that freely flew over it when we were all locked in eerily familiar spaces during the pandemic, trying to generate mental spaces. When everything stopped, even the ring road behind his house, Alessio noticed the background noises that emerged from that submerged continent which is any elsewhere: a mental space of minimal discourses and imagined sounds. He translated those emerging sounds into waves, songs, and poems.
Sound and imagination are the first manifestations of human creativity according to Vico. Atlantis anticipates the word. The erasure does not erase, does not rewrite, does not generate meaning: it moves, welcomes, and listens. Here, looking at the wall, listening to the submerged “Atlantis,” at the corner of our eye we see a sparkle: the glossy black of plate-letter-sculptures that stand out on the architecture, re-inhabiting it, LANGUAGE. The language rolls up into a spiral; it does not open to anything, does not allow access to further levels of knowledge. Passing through the arch, we re- immerse ourselves in the sound, in the scores, in the absence of a voice.
(Irene Biolchini)
Curated by Irene Biolchini.
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ERA VULGARIS
30–09–2020 / 14-11-2020Alessio de Girolamo (main room) presents a section of his works on language with the artist books MAMIOMEGA, THE PSYCHOTRONIK BOOK OF THE SEA, WONDER WATERS, and YOU THINK TO TURN AROUND. Letters and codes monumentalize into individual totemic entities through the succession of words, syllables, and ambiguous phrases capable of existing in an autonomous form that exceeds the logical structure of language to deliver the author to a different, archaic, and distinctly sensory dimension. The medium employed is a natural pigment normally used to fight the exposure to electromagnetic fields; this sort of pigment - used against intangible entities - leaves its material traces and stains on the pages of the artist books, as well as on the human bodies that browse the books on view. The large letter “GIANT T” stands out against the
background of the space, becoming the backdrop for the video documentation of the performance WONDER WATERS. The inscription, composed of the 12 letters arranged clockwise, combines with the hydrogen of the water, swept with brooms by the inhabitants of Valletta, causing the dissolution of the pigment and the consequent annihilation of the word. The act of cleaning
materializes in the purification of silence (Triton Square, Valletta, Malta, 2019).
Curated by Stefano Non
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Atlantis (MT)16–06–2020 / 31-07-2020
(dates of the performances)Atlantis represents the emergence of a new sonic landscape that interacts with architectures and their inhabitants. It is an Atlantis revealed by the retreat of the sea of "decibels" that once submerged it.
Inside, we are surprised by echoes, reverberations, and distortions of strings, winds, and choirs.
Distant echoes bounce off the walls, swell into the void of large desolate rooms, or echo in endless fields where there is no one to absorb their power, nor any colorful frequencies to affect them.
In this landscape, rules, relationships, and meanings are shifted as if to reveal the fragility of an illusion that, once breached, returns the profile of the void to which it gives shape.
NAM (Not A Museum), Firenze, Italy
Commissioned by MANIFATTURA TABACCHI
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sountrack Atlantis
soundtrack F3C-CH2-F
Silenzioso mi ritiro a dipingere un quadro
11–02–2019 / 23-04-2019Silenzioso, mi ritiro a dipingere un quadro is the title of an early painting by Mimmo Paladino who, in 1977, exemplified a renewed (and general) attention towards the intimate and conceptual dimension of painting as a practice – after decades of experimentation with other languages and materials that violently entered the territories of the visual arts. Today, after forty years since the creation of that painting, where does this practice stand among contemporary artistic experiences in Italy? Is painting still an intimate “body to body” experience between the artist and a specific medium and interlocutors? What are the routes of research characterizing this practice? What of the borders of the painting, which tangents and declinations do they express?
This exhibition was not conceived as an investigation of contemporary painting in itself. Such a complex and layered landscape cannot be summarized within the confines of a simple group show. Instead, the project seeks to focus on individuality, gathering a group of practitioners addressing specific questions. Issues that do not necessarily share a formal and intellectual approach but which look into diverse research strands including ideas of ecology, identity, the digital image, archetypes and simulacra, political discourse.
This project does not only articulate an exploration; instead, it is a test that transforms the statement “Silenzioso, mi ritiro a dipingere un quadro” (Quiet, I withdraw to paint) into a loosely formulated question, observing some ways in which this process – both private and public – might belong to painting (and its disintegration) today. The show aims to investigate the dimension of “making,” through the painterly medium as well as through installations and sculptures.
(Lorenzo Madaro)
Curated by Lorenzo Madaro
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WONDER WATERS11–02–2019 / 23-04-2019The creation of twelve large-scale paintings has provided an opportunity to involve the young citizens of Malta in the preliminary construction of letters made using a font conceived by the artist Alessio de Girolamo, who composed the symbolic inscription WONDER WATERS. These words are subsequently positioned by the artist like a clock face around the monumental Triton Fountain of Triton Square, Valletta (Malta). Here, on November 15, using water and brooms, the melting of language into the element of hydrogen, a generator of life, was symbolized during a public and
participatory performance.
(Daniel Azzopardi)
Commissioned by Fondazzjoni Kreattività
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Who’s Afraid of the Wolf?24–10–2017 / 18-11-2017In his recent artistic research Alessio de Girolamo uses different languages for the restitution of an inquiry about mass hysteria: also referred to as psychotronik power. For a few years now the
perception of the spread of a transversal perception has been said to be felt by all of humanity – especially on some people who have been called electrosensitive. This perception can be described as something akin to a pervasive manipulation of one’s thought and actions and occurs through electromagnetic waves.
Painting, sculpture, drawing, video and sound art merge to form through a variety of layers a disturbing landscape originating from this conspiracy theory. For his first solo show in Florence, at
SRISA Gallery, de Girolamo presents a site-specific installation that occupies the entirety of the exhibition space.
(Pietro Gaglianò)
curated by Pietro Gaglianò
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