Art, photography, books and verified stories connected to Massimo Scognamiglio’s work.
In 1998 I presented La Coscienza Luccicante at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, an artist’s CD-ROM in which pixels and interactivity coexisted with my painting. Damien Hirst’s The Currency imposed a choice instead: keep the painting or the digital token and destroy the other. The violence of that either-or interests me more than the technology.
In Mindful Portraits I look for what happens between me and another person before the shutter is released; in the Strappi I begin with photographs already worn by the public gaze. The National Portrait Gallery’s Human Presence assembled more than fifty works by Francis Bacon, alongside the torn and crumpled photographs he worked from.
In my fashion films and in photographs such as Liquid Sky, the image does not simply illustrate a story: it often comes first. Fondation Cartier’s fortieth-anniversary dossier returns to The Air Is on Fire, the exhibition that revealed David Lynch’s paintings, photographs and drawings. This is where his cinema discloses its material origins.
In the Strappi and the Cycle of Rooms I used the language of mental distress without turning it into consoling decoration. WHO Europe and the European Union are now working to bring art and culture into healthcare systems—not as ornament, but as practices to be designed, evaluated and made accessible.
Astronomers have found the trace of a possible planet, only slightly larger than Earth, in data from the Kepler mission. It is a science story, but for me it also opens the door to L’Orfano di Keplero: a book that begins with an extraterrestrial mystery and becomes a story of friendship, loss and growing up.
An ICP exhibition in New York retraces forty years of Yves Saint Laurent through photographs, contact sheets and magazines. It is close to my own work: in the Strappi I tear and repaint those polished fashion images to find out what remains beneath their perfection.