Italian Visual Artist Andrea Crespi
Andrea Crespi, Italy, 1992, Lives and works between Lugano and Milan.
Graduated in industrial product design at the European Institute of Design in Milan (IED), he focused his career on communication and visual arts. Something should be very polarizing in today’s media landscape to resonate. Crespi’s work proposes a strong dialectic between digital techniques and art history icons, revealing a new, fresh imaginary, crafting an impactful cultural identity and grafting stylistic features with the use of optical art. He reinterprets culture through the synergy of the history of art’s symbols and contemporaneity leveraging the current fast access to visual content on social media.
As often performing as a live painter, Crespi shares the process of creating with an audience unaware of the outcome, patiently following the reiteration of multiple, similar black lines. The wonder in the viewers’ eyes poses itself as a trigger for a new way of appreciating masterpieces we are all somehow used to, given the oversharing of their images in different contexts and platforms. Providing a new look to symbols of art history, Crespi calls for a new illusion against popular disillusion.
Communicating at a highly visual and direct level, Crespi’s works delineate a strong popular imaginary that easily reaches multiple generations, especially the ones of the Internet and social networks, reflecting on virality and the mechanisms behind it, fostering a message of positivity directed to everyone. ~ @andcrespi
Today, thanks to social media, we have been able to gain a space that was previously unimaginable.
By creating and publishing content and art, we can reach the world.
Artists rely on social networks more than people think.
In most cases, especially for emerging artists, it is extremely difficult to get into galleries, museums and the art market in general.
It is undeniable that social networks are removing huge barriers.
However, the control of algorithms often severely penalises our artistic freedom.
Being blacked out or even worse deleted, when art spreads and becomes known through social networks, becomes a very serious form of censorship of any form of expression.
Unfortunately, as has been demonstrated, the rules for controlling published content are unable to distinguish between pornographic images and images of nude works of art.
The problem is obvious to everyone, and often it is the image of the female body, one of the highest forms of artistic expression since the origin of art, that is penalised the most.
This continuous repression of women’s bodies is due to a backward mentality rooted in society, which does not yet allow women total freedom of expression of their bodies.
Only when people can observe art freely, without prejudice imposed by others, will there be a real victory over the issue of nude censorship on social media.
A free society cannot allow any institution or group to have the authority to decide what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. In a free society, judgement must be personal.
