Conceptual Photography of Today Giovanni Cocco Eriko Kaniwa Barbara Nati

Arte Globale is excited to present a collective exhibition of 3 award winning art-photographers during Photo London week 2019: GIOVANNI COCCO ERIKO KANIWA and BARBARA NATI The gallery’s showcase works of contemporary conceptual photography, which thematic touches our quotidian lives.

GIOVANNI COCCO

PLANTARIUM

La Garbatella and its flora are a well-kept Roman secret. An exotic and unique area of Rome - founded almost 100 years ago (in 1920) - it is known for its architecture based on lots. Originally settled by colonialist and their families, the neighbourhood is teeming with lush plants - brought over by veterans from the Italian colonial wars in Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Libya. Hence the choice to photograph plants, because they represent a kind of aesthetic, behavioural, architectural and vegetational exoticism of the entire physical place.

With this series I offers a glimpse of this treasure unveiling the neighbourhood's flora and vegetations - its enthralling green spaces. Trying to preserve its mystery while giving movement to still life.

ERIKO KANIWA

WINGS
By Eriko Kaniwa

Something is missing for my body
That sense I've always felt since I was a child
I know there is only degeneration being named a stigma on the back
There are reasons to have no wings
It is this sense of loss
It is this pain of soul
By continuing to feel the loss
By continuing to fight against that pain
The world will be mine
You can become unite as one with this world, with this body
You can become unite as one with this world, with this body
Angels
Please tell me the bliss of loss
Tell me about the wonder of gravity, that is closer to the earth and far from space HOME
Tell me no difference between life and death
Tell me living on earth planet is as powerful as humiliation of as a human
Heal me everything with your WINGS of TIME

BARBARA NATI
With digital montage techniques and reference to 19th century’s painting, Barbara Nati’s work gathers layers of meaning that can be traced to deeply seated collective memory. Even though these layers allude to the realm of physical experience, they diverge from tangible reality into the realm of the enigmatic.
Every setting, as a matter of fact, unleashes a visceral response by the viewer who is asked for a rational interpretation through a gloomy metaphor of the upcoming future.
In her attempt to analyse the chaos reigning underneath the surface of existence she combines conceptually interesting visual landscapes that blur fantasy and reality.
Barbara Nati’s oeuvre lies beyond what is commonly intended as photography, mostly standing out for its estranging effect. Her profoundly lyric investigation takes shape through skilful use of digital and technological tools. Her language always hovers between poetic and ironic, delivering essential ethical messages, with a particular focus on environmental issues.

Nati’s discordant yet strangely beautiful images express premonitions of a coming end, survival, and ultimately the genesis of a new civilisation.

Shooting Could

It's hard to imagine something more elusive and changeable than clouds; hovering steam carried by winds, waiting to fall back to the ground, to the seas and lakes where it originates. Yet man's need for control also applies to clouds through the technique of cloud seeding that results in particles of silver iodide being released into the air, by means of planes or rockets, a catalyst known for its ability to spur rainfall. A useless technique lacking scientific evidence, also used to address catastrophic situations caused by humans themselves, such as desertification affecting several rural areas and air pollution in megacities.
Shooting Clouds, Barbara Nati’s new series of digital artwork, whose title itself aims at estranging the viewer by oddly mixing the terms cloud seeding and shooting star, is the dramatic and disturbing visual rendering of the afore-mentioned desire to confine and bridle what by its nature is impalpable and free. In this body of work clouds’ texture becomes like any other, like steel, glass or plastic, used to build rockets and futuristic flying shuttles.
But the ultimate visual aspect of these means of transport is not meant to be calming; as a result of their constriction, clouds are as dark as storm clouds, only illuminated by lightning, almost on the verge of swirling in a twister and sweeping everything away. Through a mindful approach to the present and its contradictions, Barbara Nati displays in a visionary manner, a potential near future in which nature’s pure and fickle clouds along with sacred paintings’ iridescent and ethereal clouds would give way to threatening, anthropized clouds.

Giovanni Cocco (Sulmona, 1973) is a versatile visual artist and photographer. His images brim with edginess. Whether from the series "Burladies", where his camera paints the women of burlesque in hues of vibrant, almost exagerated splashes of color or from his newest series "Plantarium", where still lifes of plants sway with movement.

From 2013, Giovanni Cocco has turned his eye to the phenomenon of displacement, selecting a series of European cities which, as a phenomenon of capitalism, are emptying and depopulating . Beginning with Venice, in the series "A che ora chiude Venezia" the result is an observation of the beauty of these same sites, of its people, of architecture. Offering a suspended view of our reality that translates into deep conceptual shapes.

His work has been presented in installations and exhibitions worldwide, including Art Basel Scope Miami, ZonaMaco foto, Mexico City, MART – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Trento and Rovereto (Italy) and MACRO - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome (Italy).

Publications

Monia, 2016

Burladies, 2018

Eriko Kaniwa’s art photographs are centred on the philosophical relations between the natural and the human condition. Photography is for the artist beauty and art, which overcome the obstacles of language and distance, allowing us to experience, express, and share a feeling of respectful awe, as well as the moving realisation that human beings exist as just one part of planet Earth.

Eriko Kaniwa’s conceptually defines her medium part of the message: photography is a way of experiencing life profoundly, through the visual aesthetics’ sensations.

Her first photo book “JOKEI: Symbols of Nature Worship, Sacred Places in Japan.” 2017, was highly awarded. She won the Neutral Density Photography Award 2017 and Sony World Photography Awards 2017-2018 Commended Photographer among others. Most recently she exhibit during PARIS PHOTO week at Carousel Du Louvre Fotofever 2018 and sold his work worldwide.

Barbara Nati, born in1980, is an Italian artist, living and working between Britain and Italy.
She took classes at Parson School of Design, New York. She has since established an international reputation for her complex compositions-hybrids.

She was awarded the Bridgeman Studios London People’s Choice Award in 2018, the Ashurst London Art Prize Employee’s choice award in 2015, the Andrea Mantegna Prize in Mantua in 2014 and the Renaissance Art Prize by the Italian cultural Institute of London in 2010.
She has exhibited at several Art Fairs including MIA Milan Image Fair, Asia Contemporary Hong Kong, Art Verona and in London.
She has been a resident artist at European Artists in Olofström, Sweden and Digital Arts Studios in Belfast. Her work is collected worldwide.