Giovanni De Angelis. Art Rewind 1

"The double is the theme of Giovanni De Angelis' work. He photographs couples of twins in many of his works. Also this series of photographs of artists is based on the double, working on pairs of images or on the double somehow underlying in the same photo. I start this text on De Angelis' work from a homage to Annemarie Sauzeau and to Alighiero Boetti. [...] Photography itself is a twin double of reality, but it is an awry double, never a real mirror image. This seems to be Giovanni De Angelis' guideline in his work, especially in the works on twins and in this series of portraits of artists. Giovanni De Angelis was born in Naples in 1969. He has been living in Rome since 1992. He is interested in the phenomena involving his generation, just the one of the artists he photographs, from the ones of his same age or a little older to the youngest. For instance, when after looking into the great metropolises in India and Japan, he went to Tel Aviv, a city of great and dramatic contradictions, he tried to catch collective moments more than the signs of the conflict. [...] ICKU is a series of photographs by Giovanni De Angelis named after the sentence "I Can Kill You" and it compares double portraits of young inhabitants of Riga, the capital of Latvia; in one of the two images they hold a gun that seems directed to the spectator. Darta Lote Berzina directs a gun against us, and then, peacefully, she goes and cooks; Ronald Gails is among sport equipments, Sintja Niklase among bottles, Amanda Boka among cinema equipments and devices. Costanza Paissan is reading the acronym of the title and expresses a concept related to every word: I for Identity; C for freedom and power, K for violence; U for relationship with the other; in the last one she recognizes the main feature of De Angeli's work".