Gioele Amaro’s Missing Figures Exhibition amalgamates new digital creation techniques to revisit classical images and themes. The results offer us fresh takes on familiar material that allow us to regain a connection to material often clouded by history. Is this an apologia for the past or a way of finding something personal resonating with the most elevated aspects of the material?
Exhibition Info
Missing Figures is an exhibition to which you will always arrive too late. As we stand, catching our breath before the first of the works, we are met by the radiating aura of a figure just gone. Throughout the show, Amaro teases us with perpetual almost-meetings. Domed structures that call to mind Byzantine iconography glow suggestively, as if the missing subjects might return any second. For now, their auras come to the forefront of the images, gradients of luminous hues emanating from the canvases — perhaps we were always missing the most vital aspects of these religious scenes. We pass the time absorbed by the images. We approach the canvases to examine their surfaces, we read the accompanying text, and, slowly, the aesthetics of absence emerges as a metaphor for another absence altogether, the absence of a painter.
In place of oil paints and brushes, Gioele Amaro uses digital software, stylus pens and artificial intelligence. In collaboration with these technologies, he renders images so like oil and watercolour paintings that it is sometimes impossible to discern their origins through looking alone. Amaro carves out his place as an artist in a changing world, creatively responding to errors and envisioning how the spontaneity that ultimately makes art and art making exciting might exist in the digital realm. A master of the art of synthesis, Amaro combines, transforms, and blurs the boundaries to construct a dialogue between traditional mediums (painting, photography, drawing) and new technologies.
Amaro has exhibited in solo and group shows around the world, and has also collaborated with a number of major institutions to create installations and designs, including: Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; NMNM, Monaco National Museum, Monaco; MOMA PS1, New York, US; MAXXI, Rome, Italy; and Garage Museum Of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia. A trained architect, he has worked with the renowned architect Jean Nouvel. He has collaborated with a number of prestige brands, including Ruinart and Valentino. For the luxury fashion brand, Amaro initially worked with them for the exhibition “Resignify” in Beijing, curated by Mariuccia Casadio and Jacopo Bedussi, creating a dialogue between objects from the Valentino archive, new creations by Pierpaolo Piccioli and works by leading contemporary artists including himself. Most recently, in 2023, Amaro designed the colossal, stunning hoardings outside Valentino’s new flagship store in Paris, on Avenue Montaigne, where he also had artwork exhibited inside the concept store.
Missing Figures – Gioele Amaro.
Exhibition runs 11 April – 18 May 2024
Almine Rech London
Broadbent House
Grosvenor Hill
London W1K 3JH
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
