ALESSANDRO PESSOLI
Endless Kingdom
at Nino Mier Gallery October 7–Octbober 12, 2020
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Alessandro Pessoli, Endless Kingdom: a series of ten painted portraits on wooden board, opening October 7th in Los Angeles
The title of Pessoli’s show, Endless Kingdom, refers to the long tradition of portraiture in the history of painting, suggesting the ability of painting itself to regenerate endlessly. The choice of wooden board also connects to the longstanding Italian and European tradition of panel painting.
In this collection of portraits, Pessoli blends the features of faces found online though simple searches such as “image of smiling girl” or “image of smiling boy,” to features of invented self-portraits. We also see portraits of real people close to him, such as techno DJ Len Faki or the gallerist, Nino Mier and his future wife Caroline Luce.
For Pessoli, the face becomes an existential landscape, an archetype. In this landscape invention and reality, tradition and contemporaneity are intertwined, an antidote to the extended isolation that the pandemic is imposing upon us. In the presence of these half imaginary people, we can find a relation to ourselves and a sense of balance to solitude and incertitude.
Images of everyday objects, such as beer cans, flowers and fruit contrast with comic book style images of fish, parrots, birds and explosions. Oddly assorted, these images orbit the head of the subject, as if each person was a planet with its own ecosystem and gravitational pull.
The surreal aggregation of these disparate elements migrates from one portrait to the next in the exhibition, producing a space where the various characters relate to one another within a narration that is both playful and melodramatic, and both aggressive and charming. These defining elements bring to the surface a heroic vitality of the face as a symbol of human resistance.
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, 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.