Desiderio Sanzi is an Italian artist working in the fields of painting, installations, performance, video production and directing.
Desiderio Sanzi born in Milan in 1978, lives and works in the province of Terni. In his artistic career he succeeded in combining art, music and film. Beginning with a background as an illustrator, he travels the world. He makes films and exhibits at various biennials and international exhibitions.
“This project conceived and realised by the cultural association Art Company together with the Municipality of Milan. Fabbrica del Vapore and as a partner Galleria M77. Which has been following the research of the painter for years. I started working as a curator about fifteen years ago, immediately collaborating in the exhibitions of the Italian Factory movement. Which promoted the languages of painting and sculpture. Recovering the most distinctive pictorial and sculptural elements of the Italian tradition. Paying particular attention to the genres of portrait, landscape and still life.
Together with them, I personally curated the Italian Factory Award
for young Italian painters, from whose ranks was also selected, whom I had already discovered and met at the Germinazioni Award organised in 2007 by the Municipality of Perugia. I have always been a talent scout for emerging artists of my generation. And over time I have broadened my field of interest to include all languages. Not only painting and sculpture but also new media, new technologies and the ways in which the spectator interacts with them.
The exhibition narrates ten years of the artist’s activity in a crescendo that moves from the less recent works. The texture of the painting is rougher and more material. To the latest works in which the pictorial register changes, the backgrounds become flat. The compositions become less dense but rich in symbolism. Similar to theatrical representations that stage the latent aspect of the world.
Fragile and ephemeral beauty (the danger of beauty is the title of the exhibition), drives from below, children as dolls wearing gas masks; figures seem to be caged inside boxes and forced into a role that does not belong to them. An untiring look at what is around to investigate man and the nature of man in a continuous tension towards the discovery of new worlds, parallel visions apparently distant yet present. More and more towards rarefaction, towards the cancellation of desires and passions (Nirvana), towards emptying out (Kenosis).
“The exhibition poster is an effigy of Marilyn Monroe”
a terracotta sculpture that crumbles and burns in a purifying fire. It signifies the desire to free oneself from the myths, icons and symbols of beauty in order to be free of cravings, without constraints. And thus to be able to embark on a new expressive course and to wander through one’s own illusory and visionary world, which often returns to childhood places, to the characters of stories, comic strips and cartoons.
Although his work assimilated to that of the Pop Surrealism and American Lowbrow Art movements, we have coined the expression ‘magic realism’ for him. Which refers to the current of the early twentieth century in Italy, precisely because his starting point is reality.
The presences are real, and calling in fairytale characters or superheroes is both a way of regressing to the protected. Enchanted world of childhood and a strategy for dealing with everyday life in a more familiar and secure guise. The reality skin viewed in another way, magical, unpredictable and sometimes disturbing.
