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Italian artist sheds some tears in his latest work
Print Edition
INTERNATIONALLY acclaimed artist Francesco Vezzoli’s giant face peered across the Huangpu River on December 13th. A tear was on his face. Was Vezzoli weeping for Shanghai or did it mean something else?
The face was shown in a video on the side of the Aurora Building facing the Bund. Vezzoli portrayed himself as crying Roman Togatus. The tear was symbolic of Vezzoli’s signature series of glittering tears that he embroidered on portraits of celebrities from around the world.
The video was closely related to Vezzoli's recent research about the use of color in antiquity. The artist said he has been collaborating with a team of archeologists, conservationists and polychrome specialists to paint ancient Roman busts in the manner in which they would originally have been decorated.
“For me, art has always been a form of psychoanalysis; it allows me to address my own ghosts and personal issues,” he said.
He said his work explores the power of contemporary popular culture. By closely emulating formats of various media, such as advertising and film, he addressed ongoing preoccupations with the fundamental ambiguity of truth and the seductive power of language.
He said in the past he obsessed over the future and what would happen next, but now was looking back.
Vezzoli said he finds explanations in history for the questions in which he seeks to answer.
Dating from the first and second centuries AD, Vezzoli’s Roman imperial busts restore to contemporary imagination the decorated surfaces that have faded away over nearly 2,000 years.
“The video of my own face, transformed into a Roman bust, is a call to a past that is foreign to the constituents in Shanghai. This cross-cultural barrier was an issue that I hoped would not make the work inaccessible for viewers,” Vezzoli said.
“I hoped that they could reach an understanding that history, represented on the Aurora screen by me, could be the history of Italy, but could just as easily be the history of past Chinese dynasties. History in this regard transcends geographic boundaries and becomes a unifying measure with which we can look back to ancient times quickly being forgotten.”
Born in 1971, in Brescia, Italy, Vezzoli studied at Central St. Martin’s School of Art in London and is one of the most successful Italian contemporary artists in the world today. His works represented Italy four times at the Venice Biennale and at the 2014 Architecture Biennial. His art was also featured at the Whitney Biennial 2006, the 26th Biennale in Sao Paulo, and the 6th International Biennale in Istanbul. He held solo shows around the world in venues such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and Tate Modern, London.
The Auruaro Building project was promoted by the Consulate General of Italy in Shanghai to mark Italy taking over presidency of the European Union. Shanghai-based Arthub and Aurora Museum collaborated on the project.
The images of Vezzoli’s artwork on the Aurora screen were also part of the ongoing documentary “Ossessione Vezzoli,” directed by Alessandra Galletta and due to be released next spring.
The artist said the movie documents almost two years of his life and discloses the hidden realm behind his exhibitions in some of the world’s most prestigious art museums and institutions.
Before the unveiling of the new video work, the Aurora Museum Theatre hosted a talk in which Vezzoli shared the stage with Leo Xu, a Shanghainese art critic and director of Leo Xu Projects, and Shaway Yeh, group style editorial director of Modern Media Group.
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