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
ITALIANI BRAVA GENTE
Riello in 1996 has designed and personally produced an artwork in form of a video-game “ITALIANI BRAVA GENTE” (ITALIANS GOOD FELLOWS) a classic “shoot them up” game. The action takes place on the Puglia coast. From a gun emplacement on the coast you can direct attacks on different kind of boats filled with Albanian refugies, who are trying to land on Italy. Voices and sounds accompany the different levels of the game: the cries of raped women, shouts of drowning refugies, curses from sailors, gun-fire and the sounds of the sea. All is accompanied by music from “O sole mio” and from the Italian national anthem. It has all the aspects of a real “bad computer game” (possibly illegal) but it has a paradoxical nature when it is seen as a work of art. By necessity ambiguous it operates both as a fierce critique and an acceptance of the crude pleasure of this type of game playing. A sort of “ultimate diseducational”…..The first step in a project about xenophobia and intolerance in contemporary Italy and Europe. In 1996 this attitude in Italy was at its very beginning.
