"Every work of art is the result of a process of destruction and reassembly of cultural memory."  

Walter Benjamin

Reality, in its complexity, manifests through infinite variations, all determined by our perception. In this incessant flow, images are not mere static representations; they persist, resist time, dissolve, and reemerge in new forms, revealing their fluid and changing nature. Alessandro Giannì, with his new corpus of works, invites the public to explore this unstable territory, where the visible and the invisible intertwine in a continuous dialogue. As philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty stated, "We never see the world as a given, but as a field of possibilities."

The title of the exhibition, "Multiple Unrealities," is inspired by a painting from 2018 and introduces a series of works conceived between 2024 and 2025. Here, Giannì interrogates the very nature of the image, deconstructed and reworked through a creative process that enhances the evocative power of fragments. The subjects of his canvases are extracted from diverse contexts and stripped of their original meaning: sacred images, details from masterpieces of the past, or elements from his previous works. Torn from their context, these fragments transform into floating bodies, beings suspended between recognition and abstraction, memory and reinvention. This operation is not merely an act of removal but a rewriting of visual language that invites the viewer to reconsider their relationship with the image. In this sense, Giannì aligns himself with the practice of artists such as Gerhard Richter, who, through his use of "blurr," suggests that the truth of the image is intrinsically linked to its subjective perception.

Giannì's painting is never the result of a rational process; it instead feeds on intuitions that take shape through gesture. Each brushstroke becomes an act of evocation, an attempt to capture the ephemeral and the transcendent. For the artist, the image represents the meeting point between thought and matter, where the tangible confronts the evanescent. His painting practice thus becomes an archaeology of the visual, a journey through epochs and languages in which the digital and the organic merge, generating unprecedented and evocative scenarios.

"Multiple Unrealities" presents itself as the other side of the coin of Giannì's previous solo exhibition in Asia, "Breaking Darkness," held in 2023 at Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok. While in "Breaking Darkness" the artist explored the survival of the image over time through the fragment, "Multiple Unrealities" shifts the inquiry toward the unknown side of perception. Here, the dissolution of the image is not an act of denial but an acceptance of disintegration as an integral part of a creative process. The works in this new exhibition not only acknowledge the weight of memory but celebrate it, recomposing the past into ever-new forms, suspended between vision and introspection.

Alessandro Giannì's exhibition at Tang Contemporary Art represents not only an opportunity to discover an artist in continuous evolution but also an invitation to reflect on the nature of images in our time. In an age where information and visual overload are the norm, "Multiple Unrealities" stands as a beacon of contemplation, a call to explore the depths of our consciousness and to recognize the transformative power of art. As art critic Rosalind Krauss wrote, "Contemporary art is not so much the production of objects as the creation of experiences that challenge our understanding of the world." In this context, Giannì proposes himself as an interpreter of a complex reality, where emptiness and fullness, absence and presence, intertwine in an eternal becoming.

Michela Sena

EXHIBITING WORKS