Candy Snake Gallery presents Tutta la vita in tuta, a solo exhibition by Pietro Di Corrado (born in 1995 in Comiso - Ragusa, lives and works in Milan).
The project combines a selection of recent paintings and a specially conceived installation, mixing visual references drawn from the artist's experience, popular culture and the history of art and design.
Pietro Di Corrado :Tutta la vita in tuta
14 September - 21 October, 2023
Candy Snake GAllery, Milan
To the existential condition of contemporary man, between the mirage of freedom from work and the constant drive to be performative, hyper-productive and competitive, the artist responds by recovering the innocence of an idealised childhood, in which the experience of reality is playful and communal.
The jumpsuit, ironically included by the artist in the title of the exhibition, recalls both home rest and manual work, becoming a symbol of the duality between inner space and social competition that leads us to work harder than we should. Even tools for communication and leisure expression, such as social media, are easily transformed into arenas where competition and the struggle for visibility lead to chronic user fatigue. It therefore becomes essential to find ways to preserve oneself by creating one's own spaces of rest and non-competitive expression.
The world outlined by Pietro Di Corrado expresses both a contemporaneity rich in visual stimuli that follow one another impetuously and another temporality, in which personal memories and affections linked to a more intimate and rarefied dimension emerge. In the artist's works, a balance between these contrasts is achieved, characterised by chromatic and compositional harmony combined with a narrative levity oriented towards irony and divertissement.
An installation designed for the exhibition, made of simple brick bricks that create a more intimate area within the exhibition space, refers to the passion for architecture that was already present in the artist's childhood, when he visited building sites with his father, dreaming of being able to build houses.
In the paintings, a spatiality that hybridises several modes of representing depth, from perspective to axonometry, is associated with flat backgrounds, leading to a stylisation of reality that becomes metaphysical, a space of the mind in which memories, present perceptions and future aspirations reside. Architecture, figures and objects become abstract forms, sort of magical symbols that lead to an alternative space-time in which the most diverse references can be interwoven.
In Pietro Di Corrado's works, the fusion of contemporary and remote memory leads to the creation of a continuous, ironic, nonsensical and strictly autobiographical storytelling. His main exhibitions have included: Galleria Arrivada (Milan), Dimora Artica (Milan), Spazio Buonasera (Turin), The Balcony Collective (The Hague, Netherlands), Spazio Lalepre (Tortoreto), Palazzo Reale (Milan).
