Biography
The history of these works is rooted in the highly creative, art and design movement that fueled Florence in the 1980’s. With meticulous detail, Pier Paolo Quaglia has reworked a variety of images, details, patterns and graffitti reclaiming them for his work today. On the same level as brushstrokes, palette work and colors, these figures, removed from their context in the world of communication, are utilized to create a new meaning, entirely different from their original intent.
Responding to the never-ending assault of frenetic messages that crowd our private and public vision, Pier Paolo Quaglia succeeds in immobilizing photograms, freezing them and recomposing them in an unprecedented manner. They are rendered, filtered and re-elaborated, absolutely altered. Congruent with Marshall McLuhan’s enduring principle of “ The medium is the message”, his panels are filled with radical and multifaceted significance yet at the same time they are universal.
It has nothing to do with incomprehensible conceptualism. In this case, simply, the King is nude. With a healthy dose of amorality, given that Pier Paolo Quaglia does not pretend to lecture anyone, society is revealed for what it is. Face to face with it’s own drama, contradictions, and it’s painfully fragile humanity that can be read between the lines in these works.
Simply, generously, he sheds light on them. He brings to the surface communal thoughts that belong to all of us. They are universal. All things considered, this existential angst, melancholic compassion for human frailty, and profound sense of ethics are not exclusive to this European artist of the first decade of the second millenium. They belong to all humanity of every time and place.
Annalisa Rosso
