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Los Angeles-based artist Alessandro Pessoli is a cross-disciplinary artist who has gained international attention for his hauntingly expressive imagery, drawing from both his intimate, often subconscious, personal narrative and grander considerations for the media-saturated reality and the art historical framework that inform it. Utilizing a plethora of media, from brushwork and stencils to terracotta, Pessoli imbues his canvases and sculptures with a wealth of imagery, all connected by an emotional intensity. His chaotic compositions seem to be clumsily scattered collages, but upon closer inspection, exacting, photo realistic painting appears; he has a very delicate understanding of materiality. Pessoli’s works are rich in conflict - imbued with celebratory color yet strikingly dark in subject, featuring figures who are at once in ecstasy and in anguish, flippant and doomed - bopping in an inescapable, screwball universe. Pessoli’s recent body of work is ultimately celebratory, even if his characters are initially tormented by the state of a real and metaphysical world. Often playful guns and other weapons transform into sexual metaphors alongside fruit, and other symbols of life, nature, and innocence. With a nod to this child-like vision, Pessoli’s universe is doused in opulent color and iconography of popsicles, rainbows and butterflies. The obscure is juxtaposed with an enlightened and primal positivism. It’s the divergent emotive progressions of Pessoli’s narratives that keeps us submerged in his intricate, visual landscape.
Italian-born Pessoli Alessandro Pessoli (b. 1963, Cervia, Italy) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. Pessoli has been exhibited at institutions worldwide, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (New Work: Alessandro Pessoli, 2012), Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, The Drawing Center, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. His work was also included in the 53rd Biennale di Venezia at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice.