IT'S ALL ABOUT LOVE (2009) is the new project recently launched by Pier Giorgio De Pinto (Italy-Switzerland, 1968), aided and abetted by the Anglo-Italian artist Franko B as co-star author. De Pinto’s programmatic choices are causal, as the Italian artist has been working on the theme of identities and gender for years, re-elaborating and at the same time further developing on the heritage left to us by the original Body Art and by the avant-garde movements related to Performance and to Anglo-Saxon Action Painting, in particular the one based in Vienna. The influences exerted by Punk and Queer Punk are also far from negligible. While such artists as Günter Brus and others have constituted important milestones in his work’s development, these latter still generally evoke existential issues related to man and to his social and societal responsibility.In the face of contemporary artistic output that is still excessively anchored to the eighties and nineties, as well as to their concepts of the art market, a new generation of artists has been raising its head in recent years, rising above and shaking off an artistic, institutional and political situation that is far less pragmatic and more charismatic, frozen and incapable of interpreting recent history and events as they unfold. In such an atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion about human values, the artist – the sole element that resists and stands up to the system – once more seeks out its foundations. ‘The society of sentiment’ seems to be the major concern of a whole generation of authors [and also of the occasional curator] whom we like to dub oblique and post-technological, weakened by their consumption of communication technologies in the [vain] attempt to become their producers. The influences at work are many and varied, unabashedly multimedia and unisex.
A splendid, refined interpreter of epic, vigorous visions, this time Pier Giorgio De Pinto has come up with a video and six photographic images branded with a disarming simplicity, representing an imagery as transverse as it is genuine: expressing sentiment and not just talking about it any more.

Expounding on It's all about Love , this is what its author himself has to say: […] The montage is reminiscent of an old film of the kind used in projectors in the seventies. Everything is pervaded by a simplicity and by a family atmosphere that I set out to convey and I think I succeeded in what I wanted to achieve. I have been working for some time now with this sort of ‘society of sentiment’, which is moving man towards his heart, towards his feelings, or sentiment, even though it has the semblance of an aggravated return, weighed down by all the scars that post-technological man bears on and inside himself. I’m inviting man to look ‘at nature’ (back at times when everything was simpler), at a primeval situation, fingering his ribs, just about where they have broken as life has progressed, often leaving man to slip into a void. For our sheer pleasure and/or to give ourselves to others absolutely and totally, we have changed ourselves and shown our bodies in various more or less extreme ways and that is where we touch/look/check ourselves, every now and then, as though we can’t believe the evidence of our fingers/eyes/brains, so as to feel we are in the ‘here and now’, rather than in a never-ending nightmare/dream, believing we ‘have truly managed it’, as though ‘reminding the others that we have made it’ were not enough any more. As though the whole historical archive that man has created to ‘remind himself he is immortal’ – when in actual fact he is not – were not enough any more to conjure up a memory of what he has been... as though that archive could suddenly be destroyed for ever: so we have take our story, both our personal one and the story of ‘universal’ man, and written it on our skin. It’s from this background that the video and the series of photographs comes... starting from the assumption that ‘it's all about Love’ or ‘it’s just about Love’. […]
De Pinto is aided by Franko B, paying a conscious tribute to an artist who has evoked flesh and its symbology, not without creating often embarrassing friction with the observer’s more sensitive, remoter parts, returning his blood to his audience during his performances and representing the tormented body in a reiterated process of human wandering that stands for a liberating, cathartic journey. Pier Giorgio De Pinto involves his audience in his urge to represent and communicate the universe of sentiments, in his humble, modest desire to have a house drawn on his naked body, a house that safeguards and protects a great heart, in which the extremes of the really-experienced bring us back to a certain extent to the study that the artist has been conducting – and still does so – into the epic tale of Dionysius and Apollo, key sacred and sacrilegious figures with a ‘contemporary’ relevance in their blend between good and evil, towards the existence of desecrating and irreverent sentiment, towards a fundamental catharsis that is life against death and against the nemesis.
Nearly all shot in slow motion, the video also has an exceptional soundtrack: Our foolish hands (2008), a song written and performed by Roderick Arbre, leader of the English band The InvisAbles. As Arbre himself says […] Some of the lyrics for the song are not words... I just recorded it early one morning. Sometimes, when I sing, I create words that sound like several possibilities, then let the listener decide what they are hearing... Some of the sounds are supposed to be like a feeling, rather than the words, which are less important... […]

Mario Casanova_2009 [translation Pete Kercher]

March 2nd 2010 <