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Cattività
Gian Maria Tosatti
2021
Cattività, 2020
Environmental installation, site specific.
The Italian artist Gian Maria Tosatti reflects on the relationship between physical space and identity, reinterpreting abandoned or disused places and giving them new meaning. For the Frescobaldi Prize, Tosatti created the work Cattività, an installation that occupies two rooms in the castle of CastelGiocondo, reinterpreted by the artist to reflect on the relationship between man, architecture and nature.
The artist added just a few furnishings to the rooms, decorated in the Art Nouveau style, where the only sign of life is the light breeze that moves the embroidered curtains, within places pervaded by a feeling of nostalgia for a past lived in total harmony with the natural surroundings. “The wind is almost imperceptible, and can only be noted if visitors, who are allowed just one at a time into the installation, pay very close attention”, the artist explains, having created a site-specific work that creates a powerful relationship with the genius loci of CastelGiocondo.
The Artist
Gian Maria Tosatti
The work of Gian Maria Tosatti (Rome, 1980) is unique on the Italian and international art scene. His works are not "simple" environmental installations but rather complex aesthetic "devices" that involve different media and daring passages of scale perception. His theatrical training between Warsaw and Pontedera has flowed into his artistic research, incorporating suggestions related to the tradition of environment and performance, used to stimulate the viewer's mechanisms of interaction and participation, physical and emotional. Overall, his visual machines are experiential devices that challenge the utopian-avant-garde tradition of Gesamtkunstwerk, the "total work of art". In the last twenty years, Tosatti has created a coherent body of work that dialogues with contemporary international experiences (from Mike Nelson to Gregor Schneider), expressing, at the same time, the reasons for an irreducibly Italian research. This latter aspect is evident in the conceptual depth combined with formal rigor that informs each of his works, as in the attention reserved for the intrinsic properties of the materials used. His projects often involve the communities of the places where he works. He worked for a year in the Calais Jungle creating environmental interventions that are currently the only visible evidence of that city's existence.
The main solo shows include:
A4 Arts Foundation (Cape Town, 2019); Manifesta 12 (Palermo-Catania, 2018); Homo Novus Festival (Riga, 2018); MADRE Museum, (Naples, 2016); CCS BARD's Hessel Museum (New York, 2014); the Salerno Archaeological Museum (Salerno, 2014); Fondazione Morra (Naples, 2013-2016); the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York, 2011).