Il cielo blu sopra il Gran Sasso / Campo Imperatore

From Tuesday, March 28, 2023, the spaces of Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani will welcome the latest works of the artist Giuseppe Stampone (b. 1974, Cluses) exhibited for the first time in the project Il cielo blu sopra il Gran Sasso / Campo Imperatore. The exhibition, subtitled From global to local for self-recovery offers itself to the eye as a hymn to joy, as Francesca Guerisoli points out in her accompanying text, which Stampone dedicates to the territory where he resides, where he works and where his family comes from. The new body of artworks, which includes two vinyls, three drawings and a bic pen Blue Stampone on board, a map, sixteen photographs and a video, expresses with great vitality an affection for the local dimension, rediscovered - in the need to stop dictated by the pandemic - as a space of identity.

The artworks exhibited are made in blue and black in equal percentage. As Guerisoli points out: "Stampone employs his blue for half of the works and black for the other half with a symbolic function capable of generating another point of observation of the context dear to him, which he reinterprets here in its aesthetic dimension. Blue and black thus become tools to bring to a 'ground zero' the image of Gran Sasso, by recasting it in its landscape and naturalistic value." 

Stampone charges his artistic narratives with a purely aesthetic vision that fixes images beyond their historical and cultural significance, giving wide space to the feminist dimension that belongs to the works resulting from his collaboration with Maria Crispal, artist and performer, his life partner. Thus, the video Gran Sassa is emblematic: while revealing the beauty and biological preciousness of the territory, it is transformed by a series of Crispal's ritual actions into a sensual and poetic journey. However, Campo Imperatore is not only an enchanting mountain landscape but also one of the places that marked the History of Italy during World War II. Therefore, alongside with the naturalistic narrative, Stampone engages from a historical and cultural point of view by taking as a common denominator the Abruzzo folklore, which is put in direct connection with experimentation.

«Il cielo blu sopra il Gran Sasso / Campo Imperatore thus represents Stampone's attempt to restore the complexity of that densely layered territory both from a naturalistic and panoramic point of view and from a historical and cultural one. The historical fact that made it known is wrapped up in the complexity defined through images. Campo Imperatore is the highest part that presents human interventions, it is the closest place to the sky». 

Stampone touches the sky, and with his ink he restores, layer after layer, a visual and conceptual density that has an appendix centered on the wine culture that characterizes the area.