Aronne Pleuteri

Although he usually uses a variety of expressive media, for his participation in the Cairo Prize Aronne Pleuteri chose to rely exclusively on painting. The painting My Dromomanic Friend Takes Over a Biplane features his usual paradoxical language, suspended between the grotesque and the tragic. The scene is cartoonish: a clumsy aviator, accompanied by his navigator, tries to maintain control of the aircraft. The outcome is a foregone conclusion, which is the crash of the plane. The style is the artist's usual one, with bright colors, strongly contrasted, diluted by a rough, “dirty” drafting, with the mark remaining well in evidence as if it were a drawing made with a brush. “The painting is a tautology,” Pleuteri explains, referring to the circular progression of the composition, which is structured from the spinning of the propeller. “The scene depicts the moment before the disaster: the contrast between the cartoonish and dramatic tone represents a generation, mine, accustomed to the clash with reality, to disillusionment from dreaming, to the impossibility of realizing and concretizing one's imagination.” The playful and the tragic dimensions thus mingle in a work about which Pleuteri declares inspirations as varied and heterogeneous as Aeropainting, the art of Lee Lozano and Philip Guston, the philosophy of Paul Virilio, but also objects of childhood memory such as Kinder egg surprises and board games.

Stephen Castles