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REAL TIME
21-09 / 15-12-2024Human creative expression has always dealt with the idea of timelines and the idea of
editing. Contrastingly, nature has never cared about this aspect, it does not have
consciousness of this, provided that it has consciousness at all. The idea at the core of this
project was how to make these two entities 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.
The software Real Time has precisely this task. 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 given the role of relating the natural acoustic landscape to the
human writing of scores.
How does all of this happen? It takes place with a microphone recording that is read by the
software which contains a pre-loaded track, a score, 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 it.
There is no type of pre-sampling or machine learning that investigates the soundscape
such that one would expect from the very idea of software. In this sense it is a software
that denies itself.
In the 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. For this reason, it matches the
results returned by the real time software which also works within the sculpture and whose
content is related to the composers of the Venetian school. The object itself is made of
super-mirror steel. It mirrors the outer environment. I wanted to further underline the visual
relationship that is at the basis of the work: the clash with nature, here embodied by the
trees, the garden, lawn, the musical score, and the compositions that are contained within
the various tracks.exhibition link
TRE
08-03 / 28-05-2024Since 2016, the work on "real-time" has evolved in 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," aimed at fostering an immersive dialogue between the audience and the sound landscape.
The first presentation takes place at the Linea gallery spaces in Lecce, Italy.
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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. 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)
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Arcanum03–11–2021Permanent digital exhibition for Exibart Digital Gallery.
“Arcanum is an audiovisual code resulting from the symbols used for divinatory readings of the "arcana. Created on orchestral scores, the code magnifies the rich details of historical tarot cards, simplifying and amplifying them, presenting twenty-two images "constructed" on a staff line and an equal number of three-note chords that can be listened to online in succession. Continuing the work on alphabets and numbers, I investigated the arcane code of tarot cards, transforming visual details into augmented supporting structures, scaled up to fill the entire space of the staff and sometimes becoming Escher-like figures. For the composition, I drew inspiration not only from the divinatory art of tarot cards but also from Aleksandr Nikolaevich Skryabin with his mystical chord: a succession of notes conceived by the Russian composer and pianist as both a harmonic foundation and a key to interpreting the "Divine" in the symphonic poem Prometheus. By sampling the wind, the quintessential invisible element, I synthesized a digital instrument resembling an organ with which I performed the sound track.” (Alessio de Girolamo)
Arcanum is 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 for the sector, developed starting from 2019 when the design company launched a national concept to invite the best Italian artists to dialogue with the excellence of furniture design.
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. Those parrots that took over Milan, the same ones that freely flew over it when we were all locked in eerily familiar spaces, 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 an elsewhere, a mental space of minimal discourses and imagined sounds. He translated those emerging sounds into waves, songs, poems.
Because 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, listens. So here, looking at the wall, listening to the submerged Atlantis, out of the corner of our eye we see a sparkle: the glossy black of those plate-letter-sculptures that stand out on the architecture, re-inhabiting it. LANGUAGE. The language rolls up into a spiral, 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 voice.
(Irene Biolchini)
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ERA VULGARIS
30–09–2020 / 14-11-2020Alessio De Girolamo (main room) presents a section of his work 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 pictorial medium used is obtained from a recipe with natural ingredients against electromagnetic field contamination, becoming a sign that dusts and stains proportionally to page consultation, visibly marking the human body with the same pigment created to nullify the action of intangible entities. The large letter "GIANT T" stands out on the background of the space, becoming the backdrop of 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).
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Atlantis (MT)24–06–2020 / 31-07-2020
(dates of the performances)"Atlantis" is the emergence of a new sonic landscape that interacts with architecture and its 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 man to absorb their power nor colorful frequencies to hinder them.
In this landscape, rules, relationships, and meanings are shifted as if they wanted to reveal the fragility of an illusion that, cracked, returns the profile of the void to which it gives shape.
NAM (Not A Museum), Firenze, Italy
committed by MANIFATTURA TABACCHI
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sountrack Atlantis
soundtrack F3C-CH2-F
Silenzioso mi ritiro a dipingere un quadro
11–02–2019 / 23-04-2019«Silenzioso, mi ritiro a dipingere un quadro» is the title of an early painting by Mimmo Paladino who, in 1977, highlights 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 visual arts. Today, after forty years since the birth of that painting, where does this practice stand in relation to its intimate/private dimension among contemporary artistic experiences in Italy? Is painting still an intimate “body to body” between the artist and one or more specific media and interlocutors? And what are the routes of research characterizing this practice? And the borders of the painting, which tangencies and declinations have they expressed?
The exhibition is not conceived as the investigation of contemporary painting in itself. Such complex and layered landscape can’t be summarized through a simple group show. Instead, the project intends to focus on individuality, gathering a group of practitioners addressing specific questions. Issues that do not necessarily share a formal and intellectual approach but that look into diverse research strands related to ideas of ecology, identity, the digital image, archetypes and simulacra, political discourse, but also form a matter, and so to the medium, moving through and beyond the concept of painting.
Therefore this project does not articulate as an exploration, instead as a test that transforms the statement «Silenzioso, mi ritiro a dipingere un quadro» (Quiet, I withdraw to paint) in 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 wants to investigate the dimension of “making”, through this medium as well as through installations and sculptures.
(Lorenzo Madaro)
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WONDER WATERS11–02–2019 / 23-04-2019The creation of twelve large scale paintings has been the opportunity to involve the young citizens of Malta in the preliminary construction of letters made with a lettering conceived by the artist Alessio de Girolamo, who composed the symbolic inscription "WONDER WATERS", subsequently positioned from the artist like a clock around the monumental Triton Fountain of Triton Square, Valletta (Malta). Here, on November 15, with the use of water and brooms, the melting of language in the element of hydrogen as a generator of life was symbolized during a public and participative performance.
(Daniel Azzopardi)
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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 enquiry 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)
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