Giovanni Motta

SOLO DEBUT IN CHINA

GAME​

OVER

​play again？

ONGOING: 24 April - 06 June, 2021 | Shanghai

At the basis of all of this, of my creatures, there is a great passion, for art, for the history of art, and everything that we get close to in this world. I have a route,

a pathway... until the work is finished,
the objective is not important. The value is found in the constant daily work, perfecting every piece: value is found in my relationship with my collaborators,
great professionals, with whom I share
many wonderful hours of creation. It is this passion which created this world. My sculptures are creatures which allow you to go back in time, to go back to when you were a child; they are a carousel ride without fear. Momonsters are funny and colourful, but they do have a dark side which you can read in their gaze; they seem alive and make you think. Personally, I do not think I will ever stop, I will keep on developing this, I feel like, how can I express this, it is my salvation.

​

INFLUENCES AND INSPIRATION

Colours are absolutely fundamental to my creatures, and these are taken from cartoons. When I was young I looked at cartoons in black and white, and I used to imagine what the colours could be... and the colours of the true original cartoon. I used to draw and tried to add colour to the black and white images. Over time I created my own portfolio of colours, but not the same as that of

the cartoon. When I began creating my own designs, right at the beginning, I found it and that is where the colours I use for my pictures and sculptures came from. The link with Japan is inevitable for me, I love the Japanese people and I love the country, and everything that makes up the Manga culture.

I could well be an “Otaku”, a Japanese
word for people with obsessive interests.
I love spending time changing the shape of sculptures, sanding them and rubbing them so that they are perfect. As much as the way I played as child was imperfect and disordered, I love it just as much that my sculptures are perfect when they are finished.

ARTISTIC ROOTS

When I was 9 or 10 years old, I used to enjoy designing comic strips on white pages, which were used for drawing, and I remember spending hours producing comic strips, instalments, fantasy stories; in essence I drew robots and I was a huge fan of Japanese comics, just as I am now, but the Japanese characters were not just robots and it was not just those that I drew. A short while ago, I found one of these, with a number of sketches; they weren’t closely related to these but, all the same, I realised that thirty years on, everything began there. At that point the seeds of this concept had been sown, then it took some time for it to return, but it did and now the characters have been born.

​

CREATION

Obviously I do have many others in the process of being made, I have a laboratory — let’s call it a factory — where people work with me to create them. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of work goes into each one. They are all magnetic, some parts are made from carbon fibre, and others are made with layers and layers of sanded resin. The colouring is done with the same procedures as in paint booths for cars, so in essence it is industrial painting. The colours, as I mentioned, are from a portfolio of colours I imagined; they are finished with a transparent resin which is polished a number of times, then once the monster is finished it is put on display.