Luciano Palmieri Biography
Luciano Palmieri was included in that period by Renato Barilli in the "New Futurism" group for his tendency to project work into the dimension of artifice, into simulation, into electronic postmodernity; a group that shared the celebratory utopia of technology, the playful component and the all-encompassing dimension of the artistic act with original Futurism, often resulting in contaminations with design. In the early eighties Palmieri gave his sculptures shapes in sweet and sugary colours, he seemed to want to create a kind of edible art or he created objects with a smooth architecture on folded and painted metal sheets, with industrially sprayed shades, resembling a post-modern nature. They were anthropomorphic objects that were inspired by other known objects, unique, dilated, emphasized objects within which references and allusions were hidden to which new rings of meaning could always be added. In the first "Natures" created starting from the second half of the 1980s, Palmieri dealt with themes that are highly current today, such as the natural-artificial union and a new representation of nature in relation to current highly technological life systems. In the sculptures of that period, made at human height and in enamelled metal, Palmieri gives shape to a hybrid and mutant nature that adapts to its habitat and to man. In recent sculptures, an operational rigor is revealed capable of rendering a refined sculpture-object, where the execution entrusted to the machine and to the artist-craftsman are the homologation of making art. In fact, Palmieri demonstrates how the design methodology in the industrial system can provide aesthetics beyond design. The making of the work, its progressive passage from concept to matter and form, its presentation as a unique and finished product, denies any other possibility of function that is not exclusively an aesthetic message. The carefully finished and polished "Immaterial Natures", in stainless steel, refer to a conceptual process whose linguistic signs invent variously repeated and aerial structures, returning the surprise of levity and immateriality to those who look at them. The setting of these "Natures", often suspended in the spaces of the gallery, clearly demonstrate the intent to suggest to the observer the idea of organisms in continuous development, forms that have lost their gravity. The new sculptures are amorphous, they do not refer to any organism existing in nature. Their substance is the energy that surrounds bodies, the immateriality that flows in and out of things and that turns into visual matter, transforming into steel structures that thin until they become invisible filaments.
