Giuseppe Veneziano's giant blue banana invades one of Tuscany's most beautiful squares

A giant blue banana invades one of Tuscany’s most beautiful squares. It is the large sculpture that Giuseppe Veneziano (Mazzarino, 1971), one of Italy’s best-known and most appreciated neo-pop artists, brings to Piazza del Duomo in Pietrasanta for his new exhibition The Blue Banana. The exhibition, sponsored by the City of Pietrasanta and curated by Andrea B. Del Guercio, and set up from June 20 to September 14, 2021, has been specially conceived for the spaces of Piazza Duomo and the Historic Center, and the event will follow a path that will involve the public in a game of discoveries and revelations among fourteen monumental works, all born and made in the marble workshops and bronze foundries of Pietrasanta.

The title of the entire exhibition applies to the large size of the sculpture that Giuseppe Veneziano brings in front of the cathedral and alludes to the economic-financial dimension of Western Europe, in which the great political capitals, from London to Frankfurt, from Paris to Brussels, from Basel to Milan and Turin, are connected. Veneziano “draws”, in the geography of the Old Continent, a megalopolis, identifying how much the productive area has taken the shape of a recognizable banana in the “blue” of the European Union. In the work, the economic and political reference merges with the contemporary artistic one, where the banana refers to one of Andy Warhol’s Pop Art icons, the symbol of the very famous Velvet Underground & Nico album cover. The Blue Banana thus summarizes Giuseppe Veneziano’s artistic research, attentive to the representation of the dilemmas that characterize today’s society in all its forms (politics, entertainment, costume), but also mindful of the evolutions and paths of art in history.

“The spatial centrality of the fruit with its large size and intense monochrome, an iconic subject capable of joining child nutrition with the erotic dimension of adults, plays the monumental ’ancient’ role around which revolves by dissemination, the articulated narrative conducted by ’ images’ to which Veneziano has put his hand. Along the connective tissue dedicated to the great tradition of art, allusions to personalities of the chronicle, historical figures, icons of cinema and comics, and actors of contemporaneity burst in. It is through the mash-up technique (the same one used by many contemporary dee-jays) that Veneziano connects contrasting elements, resulting in images capable of creating novel and surprising visual associations: Dante Alighieri (whose 700th anniversary of his death occurs this year) intent on writing his Divine Comedy on a Macbook laptop, Dolce and Gabbana, along the lines of the other famous Italian-English artistic couple Gilbert & George, Charlie Chaplin with Venus, Snow White Assassin, Michelangelo’s David, Spider Man with his son, and finally on the parvis of St. Augustine Pope Francis on a skateboard. With the iconographic tools at his disposal, which he inherits from his scholastic memory and which he reworks by imposing himself on the monumental, noble heritage of the past, Veneziano confirms that he belongs to a finally independent expressive culture; the expressive operation ’overwhelms’ any widespread fear induced by global comparison, overrides with freedom of action the search for circumscribed and protected spaces, ’archiving’ any attempt to condition in a single cultural geography, free from the obligation to ’localize’ the linguistic dimension of art.”

The Blue Banana project is completed at FUTURA Art Gallery, which will display Giuseppe Veneziano’s works on canvas, transforming the exhibition space into a contemporary picture gallery with the artist’s most iconic pieces. One of them all is Cryptocurrency, which serves as a common thread between the exhibition in the square and the one in the gallery: the Portrait of the Cathedral with Medal by Sandro Botticelli, instead of holding the leffiges of Cosimo the Elder holds an ideal Bitcoin, the value the artist has assigned to the work and which will remain so forever.

Giuseppe Venezianon was born in Mazzarino (Caltanissetta) on Feb. 22, 1971. He graduated in Architecture in 1996 from the University of Palermo. The first time Giuseppe Veneziano’s pictorial work was noticed nationally was in 2004 on the occasion of an exhibition entitled In-Visi curated by writer Andrea G. Pinketts at the local Le Trottoir in Milan. In 2007 he participated in the VI St. Petersburg Biennial; in 2008 he was among the twenty artists invited to represent lltalia at the Artâthlos exhibition on the occasion of the XXIX Olympic Games in Beijing; in 2009 he participated in the IV Prague Biennial. In 2010 the public exhibition Zeitgeist in Pietrasanta brings Veneziano back in the national and International news for the presence of the work The Madonna of the Third Reich. In 2011 he was invited to the Italian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, in 2012 to the Italy-China Biennale of Contemporary Art, Villa Reale in Monza. In 2015 he participated in the exhibition Treasures of Italy, EXPO 2015, Milan. In 2016 he began teaching at the Aldo Galli Academy of Fine Arts in Como. In 2017 he participates in Milan Design Week with a sculpture in Carrara statuary marble entitled White Slave. In 2019 he realizes two public exhibitions of considerable success with the public and critics: the first at Palazzo Ducale in Massa and the Second at Museo Riso in Palermo. In 2020 he realizes the public exhibition Giuseppe Veneziano VS Raffaele Sanzio in San Benedetto del Tronto. His works have been exhibited In Germany, France, England, New York, California, Dubai, China, and Russia. He is recognized by critics and magazines as one of the leading exponents of Italian and international New Pop and the Italian Newbrow group.

Giuseppe Veneziano, Skater Pope (2021; painted bronze, 200 x 120 x 60 cm)

The Blue Banana set up in the square

Giuseppe Veneziano, The Massacre of the Innocents (2017; painted bronze, 58 x 32 x 32 cm)

Giuseppe Veneziano, Cryptocurrency (2021; acrylic on canvas, 80 x 60 cm)

Giuseppe Veneziano, Dantealighieri@virgilio.it (2020; acrylic on canvas, 130 x 110 cm)

Giuseppe Veneziano, New Renaissance (2021; sketch for sculpture)

Giuseppe Veneziano, Spider Man Dad (2020; painted bronze)

Giuseppe Veneziano, The Dark Forest (2021; acrylic on canvas, 180 x 110 cm)

Giuseppe Veneziano's giant blue banana invades one of Tuscany's most beautiful squares

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