DAVIDE SERPETTI

The poetics of Davide Serpetti (L'Aquila, 1990) thrives on the contrast between the human and the divine, between what we can experience with our senses and what instead comes alive in the guise of the visible. A contrast we find in Synonyms, or a continuous cycle of euphoria and sadness, the work created for the prize and conceived by the artist as an “imaginative self-portrait” centered on the theme of twin brotherhood. Against a dusky sky, ringed by cypresses and maritime pines, two androgynous figures stand out: gendarmes of a Middle Ages yet to come, or perhaps offshoots of a collective dream it is, not coincidentally, a work in line with the pictorial series The Sleepers, inaugurated in 2019. If the indefinite faces are inspired by Medardo Rosso's Ecce puer, the hieratic bodies refer to the Capestrano Warrior, a fascinating funerary statue preserved at the National Archaeological Museum of Abruzzo. A graduate of NABA and the Royal academy of fine arts in Ghent, Serpetti then enriches the work with multiple references, trespassing between antiquity and pop iconography-from the knights in John Boorman's film Excalibur to Nigerian statuettes from the Yoruba people dedicated to the cult of twins.