Turning what is not-familiar (un-heimlich) into something familiar (heimlich), cracking the certainties of everyday habits, transforming trivial items in icons. Riello's for 30 years has been working with his distinctive wittines in order to make clear that irony is the right (and very serious) approach to Contemporary Art. His irony knowns how to play with what is taken for granted, underscoring alternative points of view and new perspectives. His work may be naturally associated to Aldo Mondino's one and to younger artists like Erwin Wurm (Austrian) and Martin Kippenberger (German). An artistic attitude with a lot of intellectual transgression and refined taunt. His Ladies Weapons (real military guns decorated like elegant accessories for sophisticated ladies), Tarokki (an array of curious fakes luxury items), Italiani Brava Gente (an art videogame about Italian xenophobic attitude against Albanian people, made in 1997), Ashes to Ashes (the amazing glass urns cointaining the relics of his personal library) are all mirroring the artist relationship with Western Civilization and his paradoxes. Riello has also a defining sense of jest (mot d'esprit) and a particular taste for detournements, someway a kind of British "witticism" perhaps originated through the long time he is used to spend in London.
However Antonio Riello, although playing in the Conceptual Art context, all the time pays all carefully attention about the visual impact of what he makes. His Ex-Voto, military airplanes and rockets painted and decorated like the ceiling of Veneto churches, borrow from Tiepolo family frescos the typical atmosphere of Venetian skyes. Somebody could says his pious missiles seem fit enough to go directly to Heavens where God is in charge.
Riello most recent works keep going between real life and cultural Wonderland: recycling coconut fibers and playing with AlterModern icons he rescues the humble doormate from sloppiness and the banality of domestic routine. Here the traditional place for a coosy cat is occupied by a shit recalling directly the eponymous Piero Manzoni's "canned shit". There the usual "Welcome" is traded with a gorgeous palm, a hommage to the celebrated palms of Mario Schifano. The Terre Rare (Rare Earth Elements) is a group of 17 works that artistically deals with the Periodic table of Mendeleev. Another kind of un-heimlich, a turbulence in the "Natural Order of Things". Finding inside a doormate the language of Chemistry (and its parafernalia of symbols) is of course an aesthetical experience and tantamount a suggestion to merge-and-mix different languages and icons.
Antonio Riello is also a regular contributor about Contemporary Art for the online magazine DAGOSPIA www.dagospia.com
ASHES TO ASHES
A LIBRARY OF DESTROYED AND BURNT BOOKS
WESTERN TABOO AND CULTURAL CRUELTY CEREMONIOUSLY CARRIED ON
THE ARTIST’S VERY PERSONAL AND ECCENTRIC WAY OF LOVING AND HONOURING HIS MOST VENERATED BOOKS
A SYMBOLIC CALL FOR URGENT NEW BOOKS FITTING THE URGENT NEW PROBLEMS
AUTO DA FE': DESTRUCTION AS A VERY CONTROVERSIAL BUT TRUE ACT OF LOVE
PRECIOUS RELICS OF SELF-INFLICTED
BIBLIOCLASM: BOOK REMAINS
ASHES TO ASHES
A bonfire of books is a sort of recurring nightmare in History. Burning a library is like burning the foundations of Western civilization and it is stands for an act of strong cultural violence. Books became not only destroyed objects but mainly the victims of an intellectual kind of raping and torturing human values.
Riello approaches the artistic heritage and traditions of Western society with a hint of irony and a certain amount of “politically incorrectness”. Literature and Philosophy are the main target of this work, the selection of the books is related directly to the artist’s own education and culture showing the inner nature of artist identity. Ambiguity and cultural identity are the key words to understand this work. The ashes of the burnt books are placed in special glass urns designed and produced by the artist in collaboration with the well-known glass blower Massimo Lunardon. Every book has its own urn (on the urn is printed the title of the book, the date of first publishing, and the name of the author).
Besides having a purely aesthetic appeal, Riello’s installation is conceptually profound in that it symbolizes the notion that books are becoming relics of the past with the growth of eBooks in our technologically reliant future. The birth of the digital age has resulted in an immense collection of written work being catalogued exclusively or primarily in digital form. It has also been revealed that some public libraries feel compelled to burn surplus books in order to liberate valuable shelf space for incoming books. The intentional ‘death’ of the physical book and its replacement by a virtual digital version has often been referred to as a new form of book burning. The historical tradition of book burning, also called ‘biblioclasm’ or ‘libricide’ involved destroying, books or other written material to suppress or censor ‘heretical’ religious and political doctrines.
