All images Courtesy by the artist
Iginio De Luca Formia (LT), August 21st, 1966. Lives in Rome, teaches Decoration and Multimedia Installations at the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin.
He is a multifaceted artist and a musician. In recent years, his poetry has focused above all on the production of videos, photographic images, sound installations but also of what he defines as a blitz. Considering them straddling urban art and performance, the artist performs actions sometimes flying over, video projecting and running away, still others arriving in places with strong disturbing elements and visual impact.
LE VOCI DI DENTRO/THE VOICE WITHIN, 2020
Project commissioned by Atelier d’artista Mercati di Traiano, Rome. To be ready to listen, to tune in the memory of a place and actualise a meeting.The conceptual and poetical meaning of my project can be found in these actions that contemplate an intimate relationship with the space, an alternative way of being in contact that is taken away out of sight to generate evocative languages, negating the appearance. Guardians of archaeological artefacts, the niche underneath the Market has become my recording studio. The rubbing of the hot hand’ skin against the harsh, levigate and eroded surface has originated my interest in creating a sound archive that has identified through sound every block of marble, archiving them under immaterial criteria this historical presence. An illogic vocabolary of subdued voice, an imcomprehensible wispering of sentens, a surreal conversation between talking rocks that claim their soul and life. Highly sensitive microphones, headphones, amplifiers, speakers and mixers were the pieces of equipment that recorded in a detailed and devoted way all the nuances of sounds produced by the performance. The sounds generated, edited and organised like a natural flow of events live in the same space that I have used to create them in an engaging and evocative installation.
TEVERE EXPO, 2021
Project by Iginio De Luca, winner of “Cantica21– Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, MIBACT, Minister of Culture, Italy”.
TEVERE EXPO, 2021
Project by Iginio De Luca, winner of “Cantica21– Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, MIBACT, Minister of Culture, Italy”.
The “Tevere Expo” project aims to make visible the obscure and unconscious soul of the river and, as a reflection, ours: the clandestine almost forgotten and never forgiven side of us. Waste, lost objects drowned in a wreck firstly in the private sphere then in public, they emerge from water transfigurated in their aesthetical and substantial essence. Urban rest reappearing from Dante’s circle and made unrecognisable by a chemical and temporal metamorphosis; an alchemical sublimation that has overturned the initial nature of the objects. Like icebergs, the majority of the objects are underwater. Only a minimal part emerges outside: bicycles, blankets, computers, clothes, televisions, tyres, drying racks, steel roadwheel, road traffic barriers, plastic clothes, fans are testimonials of an industrial and domestic reality that has been disavowed, and after years of apnea, it crosses the limits and breaks the surface of the water toward the air. The turbid photographic images, muffled and out of focus in their profiles and as in their meanings, gain an alternative and evocative character of a merciless and unavoidable reality: the abandoned and careless one. Printed on a large format on thin paper chosen specifically because a poor and mass consumption material, they will be pasted on advertising spaces, becoming the protagonists of a unique promotional campaign that democratically sponsors the futile, the fragmented and the unusable. The Tevere floods metaphorically into the streets, bursting into the public space as a form of protest, reclaiming its soul and demands its most visionary part, its mysterious and disturbing beauty.
SOTTOSALE, 2017
Site-specific project commissioned by Apulia Land Art Festival
SOTTOSALE, 2017
Site-specific project commissioned by Apulia Land Art Festival
I went to Margherita of Savoia in 2017, invited by Apulia Land Art Festival, to produce a site-specific project. During my visit, the city was celebrating Saint Sacramento, and in the streets, there were many people, plenty of lights' corridors and market stalls. The number of people taking part in the event contrasted with their complete absence just a few metres down the road: in the salt march, silent and metaphysical, the city's noise resonates, creating a symbolic and spatial opposition. The idea came at that moment: the aim was to reunite, through a non-invasive sound installation, the two souls of the place, the people's stories, ordinary and private, and oneof the salt marsh, proletarians and public; the affective, intimate and social, and the labour dimensions. The expression “sotto sale" (under salt), as a primary form of food's pickling, is used here literally as a symbolic idea for eternity. From the thick layer of salt, eight headphones emerged, transmitting the memories of the people interviewed: eight as the octagon of the Castle of Monte, the symbol of Puglia. From each headphone, it is possible to listen to the story of what each person has decided to preserve, to store, to take away from the oblivion of time. Many emotional memories kept safe in the salt marsh of Puglia, a place of sublime contemplation that holds and sediment the lives of a country and its city. Each of the headphone cables measures the same as the height of the person interviewed from the ground to the ear. Therefore, the person listening is encouraged to identify physically and emotionally with the storyteller in a dynamic atmosphere kept alive in the present.
MEGAFONI/MEGAPHONES, 2017-2019
MEGAFONI/MEGAPHONES, 2017-2019
The megaphone is a symbolic element that found reference into political and folk history. In my work I have used it under different forms to summarise the political and poetical dimension of my artistic practice. In an exhibition where the audience has been asked to participate in a role game, the megaphone was transformed addition to it a reflective surface and the ability to rotate 180º; then I have placed some poetic writing in front of the acoustic bell, citations inspired by Libero de Libero which suggested a lyric and revolutionary tone at the same time; for the purpose of a performance in 2018 part of the project “NoPlace” in the ex-Vaccari ceramic factory in Santo Stefano of Magra (SP), I created a ceramic model. In here, my voice was passing through the megaphone exiting the object “sublimated”, filtered by the material that has itself gone through a process of transformation in the kiln. Finally, the megaphone has been the protagonist of a thematic ‘blitz’ (2018), dedicated again to Libero de Libero and taking place in Fondi, his place of birth.
SOLARIUM, 2015-16
SOLARIUM, 2015-16
In the series of work under the title Solarium (photograph and video), De Luca continues his artistic research through actions which aim to activate reflections. He creates some impediments that restart the process of thinking. He mines stereotypes and makes visible the hidden meaning of things in an attempt to subvert reality. The strictly frontal images, motionless and suspended or imperceptibly transient in which sublime and triviality, splendour and desolation, beauty and decay, lifelikeness and staging, live together and refer to the caducity of the human condition in a contemporary translation of the traditional still life. Photogram of a fictitious reality, captivating and glazed, exposed 24/7 to the artificial light in an ordinate composition that emphasises the colours and shapes and conceals the inevitable decomposition in a suspended temporality. They freeze the emotions and stimulate a reflection on the ambiguity of perception.
