BPER Bank Gallery opens up to contemporary photography. In Milan, the solo exhibition of Alessandro Sambini

From April 11 to June 27, 2024, Galleria BPER Banca presents in the spaces of the new BPER Banca Private Cesare Ponti in Milan, the solo exhibition of Alessandro Sambini, titled Human Image Recognition, curated by Andrea Tinterri and Luca Zuccala, with the contribution of Giorgia Ligasacchi, art consultant, in collaboration with the art team of Pavesio e Associati with Negri-Clementi and Galleria Indice and under the patronage of the City of Milan. The exhibition, which is open to the public free of charge by reservation, is partially visible outside through the windows facing the street.

This is the first exhibition that La Galleria BPER Banca dedicates to contemporary photography, and it is also the second exhibition project presented in Milan at the historic premises in Piazza Duomo. “With this exhibition we open to the citizens the spaces of a historic place, dear to the Milanese, but hardly accessible except on very special occasions like this one,” explains Sabrina Bianchi, Head of Cultural Heritage at BPER Banca. “At the same time Human Image Recognition is an invitation to reflect on current issues that involve us as citizens but also as an institution, since it is part of our mission to restore social value to the community. In fact, we believe that it is our precise responsibility to offer, through art and our corporate collection, moments of shared reflection: our goal is to bring out the importance of human ingenuity, of imagination as an indispensable nourishment, beyond all the advantages offered by new technologies that remain simply tools at the service of man.”

On display will be previously unseen works, conceived especially for this occasion; with this exhibition, the artist continues the expressive research project of the same name started in 2021, in which he wants to reflect on the relations between man and new technologies, intervening on pre-existing images, modifying and altering them by inserting other information.

The artist acts like the “Image Recognition” algorithm designed to analyze visual content: he dissects parts of the image by delimiting them within squares or rectangles and assigning each of them a caption, accompanied by the percentage of reliability of the operation. Alessandro Sambini creates associations with respect to what he already knows and his imagination to create new content. Exactly as artificial intelligence would do, the artist intervenes on portions of images, observes them trying to distance himself from the overall view by elaborating his own visual vocabulary. It thus reveals and shows an alleged failure of the machine, but at the same time returns an otherwise unfathomable imaginative universe. The intervention on the image is made with a marker pen.

The exhibition aims to highlight three case studies, verifications of a method that interrogates not only the relationship between artificial intelligence and image, but also the very workings of this technology to measure instead the ability of human beings to sharpen vision and problematize the visible. Three large works set up at the windows facing Via Mengoni, visible to the public throughout the day, are the result of an examination conducted on Francesco Hayez ’s painting Mary Stuart Ascending to the Gallows (1827), part of BPER Banca’s collections. Alessandro Sambini looks at the Venetian artist’s work by breaking it down into three altarpieces and working on it with the same diagnostic method. The narrative and meaning of the original work are deliberately elided, the painting is considered and treated as an image: a composition of faces, bodies, buildings that follow one another in space. Sambini works on a double plane, front and back. If inside the exhibition space, the three large works are visible frontally, from the street, only some details are instead reproduced: a synergy of scale is thus created between inside and outside, transforming the shop window into a high-performance magnifying glass.

The other works in the exhibition, on the other hand, focus on a double side: on the one hand, photographs depicting sunny, crystal-clear vacation spots, which be taken from posters or advertising postcards from some travel agency; on the other hand, images created by artificial intelligence that simulate landscape views of important artists from the history of modern and contemporary art. In these works, too, the images dilate their original function. Sambini’s interventions, as in the case of Hayez’s work, multiply the planes of representation by highlighting a dense network of subtexts.

The exhibition includes the artist in residence within the spaces of BPER Banca Private Cesare Ponti. Alessandro Sambini, during the opening days, will occupy a desk in the Milan office, devoting himself to the elaboration of a project aimed at the analysis of the generative creative tools of artificial intelligence. The research is aimed at the elaboration of a visual catalog that will turn into a printed publication.

With Human Image Recognition Alessandro Sambini stages a dialogue withartificial intelligence, but shifting the generative action to the human being (Human) and proposing an equal relationship with the technological tool. In this case, the pitfalls of the machine are not highlighted by designating dystopian scenarios, but rather the opportunity of a method that reveals an otherwise unexpressed visionary potential. A different form of imagination.

The exhibition is accompanied by critical texts by Andrea Tinterri, art critic, curator and artistic director of Galleria Indice, and Mauro Zanchi, art critic, curator and director of the BACO (Base Arte Contemporanea Odierna) museum in Bergamo since 2011.

BPER Bank Gallery opens up to contemporary photography. In Milan, the solo exhibition of Alessandro Sambini

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