Prospettive
Lorenzo Vitturi
Money Must Be Made
Tosetti Value is proud to continue its research on the globalized world carried out by Prospettive, hosting the exhibition “Money Must Be Made” by the Italian artist Lorenzo Vitturi. The exhibition will take us to the heart of Balogun Market in Lagos, Nigeria, to observe and think about the implications of gentrification in today’s society and urban fabric.
Lorenzo Vitturi loves to contaminate cultures and disciplines, materials and images, starting from a personal experience that brought him from Italy to London, and from there to different places all around the world, including Lagos in Nigeria, which is the trigger and background for the works presented in this exhibition. The starting point of the artist’s work is the world with its infinite ways of being and appearing, the fragmented and hybrid reality of our modern times where people and objects constantly change, take on multiple identities, which are often unseen, sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden. What is certainly a primary feature of Lorenzo Vitturi’s work, as well as one of his hallmarks, is the ability to perceive within these wasted fragments the possible image, the potential form that gives them a completely new meaning. In this complex art process, his personal experience merges perfectly into a broader vision of the world, aiming at telling the same story, yet with different words. The objects that the artist places in front of the camera or directly in front of the viewer seem almost to grow by self-construction, taking forms recalling the anthropomorphic ones that have been the origin of sculpture for millennia, at every latitude and in every cultural and iconographic system. In the same way, colors spread on objects and surfaces so naturally that they are stripped off of their visible formal aspect, with the aim of turning the entire work into a chromatic celebration able to change the world, just as the world changes objects and colors when it covers them with a patina that unifies everything, a sort of silent, but no less present, doublure. We are dealing with photography, then, which is yet impossible without sculpture, without installation, without painting. We are dealing with invention, then, which is yet impossible without the real world, without the remains of a London district, without the heaps of an African market, without the people who give these places their own identity, which the artist effortlessly restores by adding his images to the already existing ones. The same fabrics appear on the walls, literally speaking the local language, as if they were a visual recorder, which reproduces words instead of voices. We are dealing with a paradoxical form of realism, then, which replaces the description of reality – a sort of documentary, if we were to use a more specifically technical term – with its reconstruction, which is actually not so imaginative or symbolic.
Walter Guadagnini
Our partners
Camera – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia
T293, Roma
Flowers Gallery, Londra
Exposed:
January 2019 / May 2019
