Giovanna Andreassi

I was 8 years old when, on the occasion of my first communion, I received my first camera as a gift. It wasn’t professional, digital or super complicated and I didn’t know how to use it, but the most important thing was that I could take pictures.

There are many ways to transform ideas, words and curiosities into a visual language, or more precisely into images. Among all of them, photography is certainly the most immediate and spontaneous one, capable of seizing the moment. A Thousandth second fraction can represent a much wider reality, both of time and space. Every day and almost every moment of our lives, we are photographers. Our human eye captures and imprints millions of images in our mind, and then stores them consciously or unconsciously. Photography manages to overcome this human mechanism, making it something more tangible. The image of an image provides the testimony of existence of all or nothing, above all of our being in the world. A deep relationship with it, a particular and intimate sensation in which interpretation becomes subjective and personal. And here an image, compared to reality, however distorted and modified, in following the visions of actors participating themselves, tries to give meaning and sense to that small part of the world that belonged to us for a moment.

 

Art and Social Identity

The mask means, in its broadest sense, soot, black ghost. It indicates an object that covers, totally or partially, the human figure to hide the wearer or conceal his identity.

…During the lockdown Andreassi, after careful observation, designs and manufactures a series of masks to give back voice, a social identity to people, through art and the use of recycled materials.

Thinking of you and your important institutional role, especially in this critical moment, the artist, retracing the history of the Verona coat of arms, dedicates to You this mask which, in the heraldic colors of gold and blue, represents our town.

(Part of the letter written by Fiorenza Canestrari on 09/07/2020 and sent to Federico Sboarina’s Mayor of the Verona’s Municipality).

 

 

Homage to Dante in the 700th anniversary of his death.

The opening and closing verses of the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise of the Divine Comedy are reinterpreted, through the subjects and nuances of warm colors, in some works by the street artist Keith Haring. And they are transported into the social contemporaneity of the second decade of the 21st century.

Two chains link the past to the present and men among themselves, in the long journey that rises from the darkness towards the light and reaches the summit of that mountain where, once again, Heaven and Earth unite.

 

 

An overlapping of pictures and a pair of boots, like the twin towers, become the adventure companions in post-9/11 New York.

 

 

A series of pictures combines ancient astrological sciences, Renaissance and modern art, anatomy of the human body and various facets of photography. Each star sign corresponds to a part of the body, a color and a symbol. Between fire, earth, air and water, a circle, symbol of Heaven, and a square, symbol of the Hearth, enclose ideal proportions of the human body of Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci. These elements find ideal assembly in the serial reproduction of Andy Wharol’s subjects and objects, and perhaps also of Pop Art movement’s contents. A perfect union represented by the male figure, however, is questioned by anatomy and photography. While the former highlights the part of body that could be called of every star sign as Achille’s heel, the latter, with the intention of nullifying gender difference places an almost androgenic figure at the spotlight as a representative of the mirror of the Universe.