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
BE SQUARE!
As part of his artistic practice, Antonio Riello subversively transforms the spaces and architecture of different museums, masking them, camouflaging them or even proposing a different approach to their normal use. His working methods often mix “Popular Culture” with “High Culture”, creating displays of sophistication and irony.
The artist seeks to highlight the particular identity of a cultural institution, related to a specific place, local traditions and working experience. So he studies the historical background of the museum, visits the venue and interviews the museum staff. This process, establishing contact and maintaining collaboration with the director and the curators, usually takes several months.
In practical terms, the artist’s idea is based on the design and production of a specific fabric (the “museum’s own Tartan”). This fabric is used to produce the outfits for the entire museum staff, a type of cultural uniform, elegant but at the same time comfortable.
The uniforms have been conceived by a young team of outstanding fashion designers, under the direction of Antonio Riello, and custom-made in northern Italy. The usual working process of the fashion system has been inverted: the artist involves in the designing process some young designers from the “so-called” Third World and the production is located in Europe.
Tartan fabric from Scotland is recognized as a worldwide symbol for a certain sort of square, regular Modern-Classicism. It is something that we know well, which recalls the strong traditions of Western civilization, a sort of reassuring home-like feeling, especially in Continental Europe.
However, in this case, Riello’s Tartans are all distinguished by inbuilt mistakes (some small malfunctions in the repetitive grid). At first, these errors are hidden. It is necessary to pay attention..... what is apparently perfect at first sight is full of problems when you look atit more closely. Every real identity is in some way controversial, and not really “squared” at all.
The difficult task of producing flaws using a high-tech industrial loom is an artistic challenge in itself (almost a “virtuoso-conceptual” artwork) and someway comparable to a “perfectly squared” Tartan pattern that has been entirely hand-painted.
BE SQUARE! has already been at Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna A), BALTIC (Gateshead UK), GalleriaArteModerna (Torino I). The Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge, UK) is incoming.
Different outfits have been created for each venue. Each project is conceived as a temporary project, for a duration of 3/6 months.
BE SQUARE! is the name of his ongoing artistic project concerning various important museums of contemporary art from around the globe, whereby the artist wants to take care of the so-called “human factor” of an artistic space, to create a new focus on the people who work there (from the museum director to the guards and café staff).
WHY A TARTAN ? In this project, the artist works with a raw material that is normally considered to be “obvious and squared”, but which is in fact infected by small mistakes and errors difficult to recognize at first sight (in this way like a virus or a genetic mutation inside an organism). This is part of Riello’s viewpoint of the “wrong side” of social contexts, always balancing on the precarious edge between the politically incorrect attitude and the politically correct one.
