A dark surface, suspended on two metal cables, stretched from floor to ceiling. Seen from a distance, it might appe-ar as a monochrome. A blank, deep space—with gloomy, blueish tones. As your gaze sharpens, details emerge: markings, an icon. 00:00. A seven-segment display—a component employed to represent decimal numerals and alphabetic characters, known for its use in digital clocks, calculators, microwaves, and other electronic devices. A relic from the future. It’s a new painting by Francesco João: Untitled (SSD), acrylic, vinyl, gouache on raw can-vas.
You’re in London. It’s July 4th, 2025. Just days ago, tem-peratures in the city soared to 37.4°C—the highest recor-ded anywhere in Britain this year. The Met Office decla-red it “virtually certain” that the heatwave was driven by global warming.
You move through the rooms of an unfurnished apart-ment at 91 Great Russell Street, turned into a gallery for contemporary art. On the white walls, a series of two-dimensional images forms a kind of horizontal pun-ctuation. A mental landscape. More recent paintings by João—again featuring seven-segment displays—this time layered over a reddish, abstract background: a sky in flames, a dramatic celestial space.
The works are interspersed with a group of small char-coal drawings on paper by Robert Longo, framed in thick black wooden frames, under glass. Jones / Dolphin in Tank JM7, J- Bone Transmission JM13, Johnny Hotel JM21—all from 1993. Visual studies and storyboards for Johnny Mnemonic, Longo’s debut feature film—a dysto-pian cyberpunk thriller based on a 1981 short story by science fiction maverick William Gibson, who also wrote the screenplay.
Set in the year 2021, the film stars Keanu Reeves as Johnny, a black-market data courier with a cybernetic implant in his brain. When the information he carries exceeds his memory capacity and threatens his life, he must deliver it within 48 hours—while being hunted by corporate assassins and criminal syndicates.
Underlying the work of both artists, a scenario where politics is liquified into data streams and human beings are reduced to overloaded interfaces.
Longo is renowned for his monumental, hyper-realistic charcoal drawings that examine the creation of symbols tied to power and authority. Drawing inspiration from Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, he inve-stigates the impact of an image-saturated culture—how we absorb, interpret, and remember the constant stream of visual stimuli.
João was always “interested in the relationship between transcendence and economics.” His SSD series is a me-taphor of a perpetual present, a short circuit, a return to the “zero degree” of painting, a niche of resistance towards a form of power exercised through algorithmic prediction. Art as an anomaly, a system error, a blackout of automation.
Power failures and data losses are a recurring and power-ful theme in cyberpunk fiction. In a hyper-connected, tech-dominated world, a blackout is more than just dar-kness—it’s vulnerability. It’s a political act. A blinking SSD display, back to 00:00.
—Alessio Ascari
