'OPS' by Pietro Agostoni at Almanac, Turin

OPS is the first solo exhibition by Pietro Agostoni (b.1990, Lecco), the second project of the new programme at ALMANAC INN dedicated to show the artistic research of young Italian artists. 

OPS presents a new series of sculptural, photographic and sound works. The research is developed in a dialogue based on contradictions and perceptual alterations, reflecting the ways the banal and trash can mutate the structures that direct our gaze.

The presented works are grounded on a semiotic ambiguity and instability. Particles and fragments isolated from their totality alter their nature, transforming details and surfaces into visions.

OPS wants to leave behind any justification: it is an expression of a comic and conscious mistake. The works are configured as rituals. An alphabet of signs, images, gestures where abstraction and figuration merge in presences dictated by the intrinsic human nature of placing our subjectivity within every reading of reality. In a landscape on copper, acid stains, oxidations and iridescent bubbles define a past or future scenario studded with the romanticism of an end read in chemical haruspicy or circumscribed between the lines and nodes of a precious wooden surface. The delineation of these visions coincides with saturations or material alterations. A fire with its evolving forms generates monsters. Burn marks from the heaters in the space spread on the walls. Organic materials, hair, brambles and wax are placed delicately on a chain nesting and composing a self-portrait in disconsolate conditions whose fragments are dispersed on the floor. Human, mineral and organic complement each other, exchanging morphologies.

Melted and rippled plastics become post-apocalyptic lands in a film where a glacial, superterrestrial presence appears, perfect and convincing as in an advertisement. The solitude of these presences is found in the obscurity of a rocky landscape, a cave of apparitions illuminated by LED screens, where silence is broken by the noises and resonances of a living and lived space.