Sovra_strutture

How will we live in the near future? How are we living a future that is already present? How have Covid-19, lockdown and social distancing changed us? What are we becoming – or, in retrospect, what have we become?
Adolfina De Stefani has posed the question by titling this group event How will we live in the near future?, and Giovanni Pinosio – with his solo exhibition SOVRA_STRUTTURE (literally: superstructures or overlaid structures) – has taken a chance to try and answer it.
29-year-old artist Giovanni Pinosio found his way, his style – and an immediately recognisable one – at an early stage of his career. His wire sculptures have already become a trademark, his trademark, completely different and distinguished from those of other artists working the same technique. Accompanied for the first time by their preliminary sketches, Pinosio’s works elaborate on the relationship between body, time and space – especially now that such relationship has been tampered with by lockdown and social distancing.
Alone with ourselves, during lockdown, we had time – whether we called for it or not – to think: think about what we are, what defines us, what we’re made of, inside and outside. We saw our bodies change, adapting to a new way of life, become stronger or older depending on how much we did or didn’t take care of them.

But we were also able to contact a deeper element, our inner part, our character, and we amplified some of its aspects: we found ourselves to be brave or scared, selfless or selfish, optimistic or skeptical, patient or fretful – and all of these things together, most of the times.
The well-rounded, stable people we thought we were turned out to be forms endlessly evolving, endlessly moving, forced to adapt: our souls and our bodies are ever-changing forms – and the flow of lines in Pinosio’s drawings and sculptures represents all this by materialising it.
I usually define Pinosio’s style by using a paradox: baroque minimalism (or, even better, minimalist baroque).

In Giovanni Pionosio’s sculptures, the body is the baroque element, winding, detailed, the shell that determines the shape – while the single trait, the soul, the iron wire is the thin, minimal element. Pinosio’s baroque is the sum of minimal overlaid traits, developing the discourse on the body in time and space.
In Pinosio’s works, sculpture takes over space. Undefined, unconfined, sculpture seems to be willing to expand. The same goes for his drawings, contained by frames but otherwise able to expand infinitely.
His trait, both in his drawings and in his sculptures, creates structures that are overlaid until substance becomes form, in a continuum of creativity and materials which gets rid of the limits of the here and now that typically bridle sculpture. Let us take his chronosculptures as an example – the materialization of chronophotography, they capture movement as it unravels and unfolds. In Pinosio’s chronosculptures, different timelines coexist, and different figures spring one from the other, so that the work becomes readable in time as well as in space.
Even the preliminary sketches are part of the discourse on how sculptures and space influence each other. The graphic re-workings of the sketches are presented as superimpositions – that is, overlaid structures – of different projects. Printed on transparent surfaces, these drawings are clearly visible only if put against a white wall (like the one in Galleria Visioni Altre) or a different kind of surface: one structure over the other, this is how the lines become visible.
Overlaid lines, both in drawing and in sculpture, are not meant to pin down form but rather investigate it: to comprehend the body, and the soul to which it serves as a shell, Giovanni Pinosio re-defines his lines over and over again, he plays with addition and subtraction, shifts his subjects in space and time, leaving present ideas behind to follow new ones, in a flow of non-finitos which can always be brought to unity. This is the body – and this is us – in 2020: a multi-faceted, shifting and dislocated form.

Critical text by Marco Duse