PIETA'...PLEEEASE :)

Art project by

Guido Nosari (MADRE)

Veronica Barisan

About

During the last week of May 2016, with the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, the art installation Pietà, pleeease :) by the artist Guido Nosari in collaboration with the curator Veronica Barisan has been placed in the city of Venice, precisely in via Garibaldi.

The artwork offer a reworked version of the painting Pietà by Tiziano Vecellio; for this reason has been presented in a central zone of Venice, in front of the monument of Giuseppe Garibaldi near Napoleonic gardens and in the context of the urban art exhibition From the city.

A great sheet has been painted by the artist, proposing as a background the last artwork of Tiziano, but without characters, in this way the spectators would complete the art intervention with their presence, acting in the poses like Tiziano's figures.

The art installation has been installated on the floor invinting the spectators to interact with it by laying down over the black and white textile and being photographed with a GoPro camera installed on a high tripod.

People who partecipated to 'Pietà, pleeease :)' were not interested to understand why the artist Guido Nosari wanted to propose an installation based on the issue so intense of Pietà (1575-1576) by Titian; the few people who asked then almost always preferred not to take part in the work but observe the reactions of the users, because the importance given to the participation of everyone seemed a kind of narcissistic revival of themselves, without any attention to the connection of the work with the great venetian painting tradition.

Advanced age of Titian and the plague that was pressing on Venice in 1576, led the author to reflect on death and wanting to express it in a coherent way to the culture of the time: through the agonizing deposition of Christ and through any self-representation symbols to express his mood and fears. The heavy denial of life proposed by Titian is evident and observing the Nosari work documentation can be understood how superficially this has been weighed by the users, whose purpose was mainly to have a souvenir photo of their stay in Venice.

Thanks to the use of wide-angle lens GoPro camera, the painting fabric seems to envelop the persons posing lying down, wants to be a stimulus to the observer of the shots obliged to think how people seem to lack the force of gravity and why they does not confer any meaning to their action.

The desoriented observer will get intrigued because in an uncomfortable condition of boredom in the lack of sense perception; for this reason he will feel motivated to seek an explanation, activating a creative interest in contemporary art, in order to take part in analyzing the artwork where he has posed.

Veronica Barisan