Gallery Func is pleased to present GAME OVER play again? - the new solo exhibition of Giovanni Motta in which will be exhibited 14 paintings in acrylic on canvas and 2 sculptures, one in fiberglass and one in bronze, of the recent production of the Italian artist.

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Belonging to the so - called Generation X and having grown up, therefore, in the eighties, it is not surprising that the signs and codes of the evolutionary age assume, for him, the form of objects that can be traced back to that decade. Japanese manga and anime, American cartoons and the first videogames, the user - friendly technology of the origins, with that mixture of simplicity and candor, and the entire merchandise catalog of the consumerism of the Eighties appear in his paintings as epiphenomena, revelations that correspond to states of mind lost in the meanders of memory, removed from the conscious layers of adult life.

 

The personification of Giovanni Motta's puer aeternus is Jonny, a child who seems to have come out of the pencil of a mangaka, whose an atomical morphology is typical of a growing individual, with a tiny body and a hypertrophic head. Jonny is the artist's infantilized stand-in, the puberty avatar, the inner ghost, the aesthetic conformation of an unconscious projection, but it is also, by extension, a signal, a symbol that indicates anabsence, that underlines the vulnus, the wound, the gash that tears the existence of the adapted and uniformed man.

 

Motta uses Jonny as a warning to himself and others, but also as an empirical demonstration that healing, everyone's healing, is possible through the rediscovery and recovery of this imperishable entity that frees us from time and senescence. In GAMEOVER play again? the enthusiasm is encoded in the form of the videogame metaphor. The condition of the player, estranged from everyday reality, is represented through the image of Jonny's fluctuation.

 

But for Giovanni Motta the videogame is - like toys, food and consumer goods - only a symbol. What counts is the mood of the player, that feeling of "divine invasion" that accompanies the moments of euphoria and amazement of childhood, an emotional heritage that seems destined to fade in time.

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Curated by Ivan Quaroni / Cherryup / Ricc