Exhibition
LUDOVICA GIOSCIA - Soft Power - Vitrine Gallery
Gioscia has created one of her decollage installations in which layers of custom and found wallpapers are installed and then ripped away revealing the strata underneath. Simultaneously operating on the architecture and importing into the space a pattern that often functions like an infinitely repeated iconic logo, the installation will work with the unusual quality of the gallery being primarily wall space. Motifs within some of her best-known installations range from baroque church plans to the jumeraiah palm tree icons. They disclose a cacophonic and bombastic collision of bootlegged patterns and eye watering colour schemes that are underpinned by a dark humour to emphasise the role of leisure and opulence that has been employed as a simulacra for value throughout culture.
For this installation Gioscia explores the ‘Paninaro’ culture, which underpins much of her current practice. ‘Paninaro’ is a fashion phenomenon that took hold of Milan in the 1980s and gradually spread across Italy. The Pet Shop Boys wrote a song about it when visiting Milan in ‘86, which is how the term found its way into our dictionaries. The Paninaros (the name given to people who took on this cultural identity) are symbolic of a decade of intense hedonism and they are the first fetishists of overall brand consumption. The actual word ‘paninaro’ means ‘consumer of sandwiches’ and the hamburger became one of their strongest logos. They were obsessed with everything American. Paninaros were a dream for the marketing world as they were extremely legible as a teen subculture and very predictable in their consumptions. Brands like Naj-Oleari exploited this by creating a ‘wallpaper-like-environment’ for them where everything matched: from make-up palettes to bags to socks to hair-bands to diaries to pencils to bed linen.
