Aldo Giannotti

Building Buildings

Aldo Giannotti’s exhibition in the gallery WOP presents works that are about architecture in the widest sense. Familiar architectural concepts are led ad absurdum and turned on their head. Most of the drawings shown come from the context of the project Buildings on Buildings (KÖR 2016-2017) and point to Giannotti’s current project Demolition. The exhibition offers a comprehensive insight into Giannotti’s particular use of the drawing as an instrument of idea creation.

Italo Calvino posited that “the artist’s imagination is a world of potentialities that no work will succeed in realising”. Concordantly, Giannotti’s creations are less about the work of art than about the influence and the effects of an idea – or better yet: about the potency and reality of possibilities. The medium of the drawing helps Giannotti ‘undress’ an idea, and therefore achieve its most pointed formulation, which can take on the form of a short statement or an unsolved question, a witty remark or a disarming joke. This strategy allows the artist to address a broad spectrum of complex issues without ever becoming patronising or pretentious.

Giannotti’s focus is on the relationship of human beings with their environment as well as the physical and symbolic infrastructure of the social space. His drawings often serve as instructions to explore concepts of social sculpture and call for their execution. They define the scope of performative actions which both the artist and his audience are a part of. Potential concepts are embedded in the rough surface of the real and tested for their resilience. In doing so, Giannotti’s drawings always seek to be put into practice and therefore become reality without giving up their potentiality. They remain sketches, drafts of reality. In the transition of the graphic visualisation of an idea to its performative execution the rules that make up the architecture of the social space become perceptible in their contingency and changeability. The representation of real possibilities can therefore make room for the presentation of new, possible realities.

Dr. Giorgio Palma

(Translation: Mag. Monika Dittrich)