BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
At first glance, Stefano Fiorina’s Immagini Puramente Illustrative / Purely Illustrative Images may be a little perplexing. Spread across a public staircase in Santa Croce di Magliano, fragments of color, symbols, lettering, flowers, agricultural forms, and pieces of what once were advertisements assemble into something that seems halfway between a festival decoration, a collage, and an archaeological find from our own commercial culture.
That confusion is useful. The Turin-born artist has built much of his practice around taking the discarded language and materials of contemporary consumer life and metamorphosing them into playful, possibly perplexing, installations, sculptures, and performances. And a party – with invitations to others to participate in their making. His raw materials are unconventional; industrial waste, advertising material, production leftovers…any and all can become raw materials for creation.
Here Fiorina begins with an old Italian communal tradition: the infiorata, in which elaborate images and patterns are made from flowers and petals, often in connection with religious celebrations. But instead of harvesting flowers, Fiorina decides to harvests advertising. Nearly 200 square meters of discarded PVC banners are cut apart until the products, slogans, corporate identities, and persuasive intentions are transformed, malformed, reformed – and impossible to read.
What remains is color and material. From that synthetic debris, Fiorina constructs a distinctly local vocabulary — arrows, a lily, a palm, a star, and a crown associated with Saints Flavian and Philomena, along with traditional imagery connected to wheat cultivation and the phases of the moon. The old agricultural and devotional calendar meets the contemporary cycle of production, promotion and disposal.
Something particularly Italian about the project is the ease with which it lets these worlds collide rather than choose between them. Tradition is not treated as something embalmed and untouchable, and contemporary culture is certainly not accepted at face value. Fiorina can borrow the structure of a religious folk custom while feeding it the residue of a society covered in commercial messaging.
Even the title comes with a wink: Immagini puramente illustrative — “images purely for illustrative purposes” — echoes the familiar disclaimer used when advertising admits, in effect, that it is lying to you with its images. The seductive picture being presented may not correspond closely to reality. Fiorina turns that small piece of commercial chicanery back on itself. The promotional image disappears; the stubborn physical stuff on which it is printed remains. Advertising promised an image. Fiorina gives us the material evidence.
And then the town enters the picture. Residents of different generations participate in cutting, arranging, and constructing it, continuing another part of his practice in which workshops and collective fabrication become integral to the finished work. That communal labor helps explain why the apparent jumble is worth looking at a little longer.
Purely Illustrative Images isn’t really asking to be decoded like a single picture. It is a temporary public event built from collisions: sacred imagery and salesmanship, wheat and PVC, inherited ritual and contemporary consumption, municipal cooperation and individual imagination, the handmade and the industrial. What initially appears nonsensical gradually reveals its logic — a community taking the visual debris handed to it by modern commerce and, quite literally, cutting it up to make its own picture.
Now on view until the end of August.
Purely Illustrative Images is made possible through the collaboration of Pro Loco “Quattro Torri,” Premio Antonio Giordano for Urban Art, the Municipality of Santa Croce di Magliano, and artist Stefano Fiorina, with the project curated by Marianna Giordano.
