Untitle

Untitled (Luca Stoppini) is a book-artwork. Conceived and created by Luca Stoppini, it sums up and illustrates his style, imagery and thematic material, interweaving a limited selection of his artworks with many iconographic references. The book is based on a series of personal digital photographs the artist extracted from his own rich database, which he considers the primary material for his work. Thus the book gathers together and reveals, in thematic order, what inspires his art: the different sources of colour and formal references, human bodies and cultural spaces, and many varied experiences and perceptive relations. These are then documented and manipulated using Photoshop; in this way they are enriched with unusual pictorial values. Characterised by a double viewpoint and inter-related and connected imagery, the art of Luca Stoppini thus appears perfectly translated in the pages of a book. In it, focused and out-of-focused images, high definition and intriguing alterations, wide open views and focus on details, all yield liquid, animated sensations of full immersion in contemporary imagination.
As Mariuccia Casadio explains, every shape and physiognomy loses fixedness and peremptoriness, it fractures and it twists: representation tends to change in quality, consistency and state; priorities are undermined and every certainty or knowledge is called into question and redefined in form and substance. Luca Stoppini defines his making art as a need to touch, enter, penetrate and personalise perceptive experiences of various types and nature. Pre-existing photographic images, portraits of faces and bodies, human personalities and habits, nude and dressed subjects, discovered simply or captured expressly by the photographic lens, are memorised and accumulated in a personal database, and then manipulated with digital tools, reducing them to pure technological pigment, so they become the soft, pliable and evocative ingredients of a personal, immaterial palette.
Like a refined centrifuge of fascinating visual materials, the project has been integrated with critical reflection or narrative asides on the artist's work by Mariuccia Casadio, Cesare Cunaccia, Luigi Garbini, Helmut Lang, Paola Manfrin, Grazia Quaroni and Marcello Smarrelli.