Diego Perrone
project realized RAVE 2015: PIEDI (FEET), video, 6’22”
The processual essence, understood as progression of consequent moments and natural evolution of shapes, is a central aspect of the video project Feet, on the meadows where the rescued RAVE animals live. Perrone’s focus in this work is not referred to the animal itself – always present to itself, in spite of the human being, who frequently lives projected towards the future or the past – but to the work’s processual essence.
A group of children went to the lawn to know some new guests: Vincent and Pedro, a donkey and a goat just rescued from the slaughterhouse. After meeting the two non-human animals and playing with them, children gave birth to some actions which required mutual cooperation and the individual hiring of a temporary role necessary to the other. Moreover the digital camera’s use by children, instead of common pencils, creates unexpected images and a reflection on what it is the role of age in relation to the awareness of being artist and the acceptance of the system.
« Diego Perrone seems to have approached his own residency with RAVE as a game that involves everybody around – both people and animals. His video “Feet” (2016) is the result of the joyous collective actions of a group of children and it shows legs and feet indeed – dirtied and painted, both rough and delicate. Using the video camera as kids use pencils and paints, the artist is creating amusing “feet portraits” that open up unexpected new horizons for the imagination. »
Iara Boubnova
Artist Biography:
Born in 1970 in Asti, Diego Perrone lives and works in Asti and Milan. The artist uses a range of media, including video, photography, installation and sculpture. His practice explores existential questions that relate to man’s antagonist relationship to nature, and to the struggle inherent to the creative process. Perrone often utilizes the Italian countryside like Pier Paolo Pasolini as a metaphorical backdrop for a greater human drama, drawing on elements from local rituals and archaic symbols in order to create unsettling contemporary allegories. Endowed with a penchant for morbidity and the absurd, Perrone’s work recurringly engages with death, irrational violence, the passage of time and the precariousness of human life.
His works have been exhibited in international museums and events, among which the MAXXI in Rome, Museion in Bolzano, the Guggenheim in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Torino, GAM and PAC, Milan, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, Italics: Art between Tradition and Revolution, 1968-2008 curated by Francesco Bonami, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Museo MAN, Nuoro, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagabria, After Nature curated by Massimiliano Gioni, New Museum, New York.
He participated at the 53rd Venice Biennale – The Encyclopedic Palace curated by Massimiliano Gioni, at the 4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick, at the 11th Triennale India, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2005, Moscow, and at the 50th Venice Biennale – the Zone.