ALESSANDRO DI PIETRO / ESSENTIAL-CONFIDENTIAL

The location, first and foremost: for this show, Essential-Confidential, Paola exhibition inside a historic hardware store nearby Piazza Carlina in Turin. A choice that is not only evocative but charged with meaning, since the hardware store is a workshop, a place of transformation, where ‘there are things to fix, to complement, to build’: a forge, real and metaphorical, where memories can be recovered, fixed and made manifest.

The title of the exhibition recalls the essential and the confidential as interwoven aspects in a single confession: it appears to suggest that the essential can only be found in the unveiling of an almost secret, private and remote dimension, which the artist lets us into through an exploration of his own memory and identity.

This exhibition is not just a collection of works, as Alessandro explains, but an unpacking, a staging of artistic and personal experiences: ‘I actually intended to process a whole series of minor fundamentals, even pop ones, linked in a double knot to my training, not simply artistic, but also sentimental’.

Of the five works in the exhibition, three are new productions. The first work is an unpublished photograph titled The First Time, apparently a strange portrait of Brian Molko (Placebo’s frontman), but in fact a reconstruction of a childhood memory by Alessandro, an important moment of fulfilment. ‘It was Christmas 1998, I see this video on MTV and I start to feel a sort of attraction towards the singer’, he recounts, ‘an attraction that was not sexual, but erotic in a ider sense: for the first time I considered my identity, and a desire based on an entity that I did not acknowledge in binary terms’. A memory to be reconstructed then: Brian Molko is played by Valentina, a friend of Alessandro’s, who through make-up and hairstyle work sets the artist, and us with him, in front of an image that is ambiguous by nature, falsified and implicitly monstrous as only memories can be.

Another largely autobiographical work is the Autoriquakkio (2024): an anthropomorphic swan that crashes, upside down, against a hemisphere of lithographic stone, on which Milan Cathedral is engraved. ‘It is a sculptural self-portrait,’ says Alessandro, ‘a model of beauty that fails’. There is therefore the theme of acceptance, one’s own and others’, but there is also the image of the fairy tale crashing into reality, one would think, yet the whole thing, while leaning on a hemisphere, is in perfect balance: as if the crash were part of the game. The failure of perfection is already implicit in its idea.

Music is another key theme in Alessandro’s biography, and one of the works on display is a musical score: a lithograph titled You Know You’re Right (Pain x 71). It is an arrangement of You Know You’re Right, the first song on Nirvana’s greatest hits album, released by DGC Records in October 2002 and the last song recorded by the band before Cobain’s suicide in April 1994, to which the title was given after his death. The concept of ‘posthumous’ appears to be particularly dear to Alessandro. But more importantly: ‘My big taboo in life has always been that I could not play music’, he says, ‘and this composition is an attempt to mend this void’. The notes become a bridge between past and present. As through Brian Molko’s photography, and in the swan, there is again an exploration of the poetic and sentimental grounds bubbling up in adolescence, or pre-adolescence, which Alessandro refers to as his ‘ghosts’: ‘the ghosts of my practice, elements that have always worked underneath. Here we go, it’s a good time for me to pull them out’.

In Essential-Confidential, the artist and the viewer share a moment of deep connection, an intimacy that runs between art and life. Each work invites the viewer to explore their own inner universe, turning the essential into a shared
experience.

When a vestige of someone else’s memory touches you, and for a moment it feels like your own, you know you’re right.

Fabio Cherstich