Artist Statement & Biography – Giorgio Gerardi

My work moves between the visual arts and sound. I make photographs, videos and experimental music, and they keep feeding into each other. What interests me is how perception, and the tools we use to look, can turn an ordinary detail into something abstract and atmospheric.

I started out fascinated by the avant-gardes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the way they broke with the idea that an image should simply reproduce reality. In 1978 my photograph Superficie Geometrica won the prize for best photograph at the annual group exhibition of the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, and it was later acquired by Ca’ Pesaro, the International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice. The following year I showed my work with three other artists at the Foundation’s space in Piazza San Marco.

Then my professional life took over, and for many years there was little room left for research. I came back to it at the end of 2019 and picked up exactly where I had left off: what is left of an everyday object when you frame it so closely that it turns into shape and color?

Since then I have been working on color, form and the things around me (an unmade bed, the inside of a dishwasher, a patch of sky), and I have brought artificial intelligence into my video and photographic series. I makes the soundtrack for each of his films, and several of them have been selected by international festivals, including Video Art Miden, the Seoul International AI Film Festival and VASTLab in Los Angeles. I have also released three albums of electronic and ambient music, which I wrote, sound-designed and produced myself.