Alessandro Pessoli at Marc Foxx

Artist: Alessandro Pessoli

Exhibition title: Morning Becomes Eclectic

Venue: Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, US

Date: March 25 – April 22, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles

Marc Foxx Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Italian-born, Los Angeles based Alessandro Pessoli, in his fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.

The exhibition presents sculptures, paintings, and drawings all of which contain new processes, techniques, and approaches.

Artist statement

“Morning Becomes Eclectic” is the title of a music radio program on KCRW, which I often listen to in the morning, while driving to the studio after dropping off my daughter at school. It’s a time when I am alone in the car, just like millions of other people in Los Angeles, and I think of my own work, and what I can do. Ideas come and fade away, like daydreams. It is a mental space, a time dedicated to imagination—my visions are amplified and accompanied by the music on the radio.

The title of the radio program perfectly describes the nature of both this time and my intensions in the work. I am glad it exists and I decide to use it, as another ready-made.

The entire show is a big self-portrait. The subject of the works is myself, my private life. In AP Backyard, the figure is a picture of a wigged self that I’ve taken on a platform that I built on a dead tree trunk in my yard. In this painting is my new Country with its landscape and mythologies.

But, like a word repeated many times, my self portraits lose their original meaning and become something different: imaginary freedom, collective stories, social satire. To me they represent a quirky and sentimental poetry about life.

In all these works there is a continuous passage of my physical figure and psychic inner life into an eclectic array of techniques and materials: drawing, painting, ceramic, embroidery, sculpture, bronze fusions, papier-mâché… combined in the same pieces. Me Myself and I is the reconstruction of a chopper, with a ceramic engine and papier-mâché tank, a bronze logo and a welded brass foil exhaust pipe. Here the boundary between the definition of a real object and an invented, dreamed one is very thin. It wants to be a body, a romantic landscape, more than a remake.

Multiple origins and references form the architecture of these works. In the drawings there are bits of William Blake and his Divine Comedy, Captain America and The Avengers, Popeye, a crucifixion of Rembrandt, the dollar sign and an Andy Warhol’s skull, images of culturists, the arms of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Disney’s characters. In the paintings there’s the Americana, the Colt revolver, and images of choppers’ engines. In the sculptures, ceramic heads hang from structures realized with bicycles’ frames cut and welded, or heads sculpted with pine and lemon wood from my yard. An old sweatshirt and shoes that I used for years in the studio are enriched with glitter and patches.

The origins are diverse and eclectic, and they journey in my head. It is not important to list them all, but what these works all seek for is a balance between emotionality and reason, melancholy and happiness, insecurity and stability. Like in the mobiles, each object, each weight (physical or metaphorical), each action and movement influence each other, looking for its own momentary point of equilibrium within its natural law.

–Alessandro Pessoli

Recent solo exhibitions include The Neighbors, MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro, Nuoro, Italy, 2016; Ennesima, Palazzo della Triennale of Milano, Milan, Italy, 2015; Project Room: Alessandro Pessoli, Villa Paloma, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Montecarlo, Monaco, 2015; Il mio cuore sulla spiaggia, Galleria Zero, Milan, Italy, 2015; TESTA MATTA, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, Belgium, 2014; Autoiratto Petrolini, Greengrassi, London, 2014; and New Work: Alessandro Pessoli, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 2012.

Alessandro Pessoli, Lonely Hours Working for Me, 2017, customized, welded, and painted steel parts, painted ceramic, glazed ceramic, bronze, handmade chain, fabric, and glitter

Alessandro Pessoli, Me Myself & I, 2017, customized, welded, chromed and painted steel parts, bronze, brass, ceramic, felt, silk, wood, papier mache, synthetic hair, acrylic and enamel paint, 61-3/4 x 128 x 37-1/2 inches, 156.8 x 325.1 x 95.3 cm

Alessandro Pessoli, 14-11-1963 Anarchy Balanced, 2017, customized, welded, and painted steel parts, aluminum, handmade medal chain, coins, bronze, lemon wood, and speaker; selection of music by Massimo Torrigiani

Alessandro Pessoli, City of God, 2017, white ceramic, wood with glitter, artist’s altered clothing, synthetic hair, plaster, pine, and handmade metal chain on welded steel frame