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Giuseppe Stampone is best-known for his figurative works with a ballpoint pen, in which he mixes and reworks images from art and not from art, from the distant and recent past. He uses them to create atmospheres of conceptual magical realism, while never failing to address the socio-political issues of the present day, such as our place in the world in the era of globalisation. His works are invented still images with a nod and a wink, in which the artist brings together art history and urgent issues relating to geopolitics, environmental disasters, migration and education. The references are pre-existing images taken from the web, hence from the so-called information superhighways — that virtual world in which everything is practically repeatable and repeated infinitely. It is a dimension or “neodimension”, as Stampone calls it, on which the artist works by way of subtraction, i.e. through the uniqueness and non-repeatability of his painting. For this reason, he calls himself an “intelligent photocopier”, wryly hinting at a paradoxical meaning that inverts the meaning, use and the status of the photocopy. These works are also unique when they become a “series” composed of related works, such as those in which two children seen from behind — be they African or even Israeli and Palestinian — hold hands while they wear strongly identifying symbols such as the keffiyeh and the yarmulke, or the shirts of their favourite footballers such as Gullit and Rijkaard, Zidane and Pogba, who are also migrants or the sons of migrants, caught in the act of observing a modern and endless city that stretches out beneath them. They are figures looking to the future. Like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (which Stampone’s series references in the composition of the image) the two children contemplate the unknown, in this case associated with civilisation.
Our present is mirrored in the urgent, dramatically poetic reality of these two children who have taken the path of migration. This is a burning issue of our present which we find in the concerns and the memories of Stampone himself — born not in Italy but in France, where his parents migrated in the 1950s. Much of the artist’s work, in fact, seems linked to this experience, as well as to that of written and spoken language, on which he bases much of his artistic practice. For it is precisely from shared or unshared language that understanding of the other is activated. This is also the purpose of what we can call the Abecedari sbagliati [Alphabet Primers Gone Wrong] linked to the broader Global Education workshop, created within the Solstizio network that Stampone heads up together with Maria Crispal. This multidisciplinary project makes use of the spoken, written and drawn word, as well as the verification of correspondences between word and image, most of the time translating into paradoxical equivalences. The project thus invites its participants — largely groups of students — to share in experiences that are designed, through critical and ironic activities, to question a Western-centric cultural policy which the globalisation has made no longer unique in a world in transformation. The same themes are also addressed in this artist’s other most iconic project, namely the production of geopolitical maps with multiple meanings, in which historical and social images are questioned by the thought of artists iconically perceived as friends, from Beuys to Ai Weiwei.
Drawing the streets of the globalised world — extending to the planispheres, travelling those roads, through the construction of participatory alphabets composed around the world, meeting different communities — is an effort also fulfilled by projects such as Saluti da L’Aquila, from 2011. Here, the artist’s critical, ethical and aesthetic observation produces a work denouncing the effects of earthquake that struck the city in 2009. Images on the walls dialogue with thousands of postcards, placed on tables, which were earlier sent across Italy, to politicians, cultural and showbiz figures and the national and international media. It is a collection of images of the devastated city, intended to make up the suffering portrait of an urban centre that is now a ghost, brought to its knees not only by the natural cataclysm, but also by dishonesty and political indifference. The setting is still the street: the place that seems to be the point from which the artist observes the world, but also the place from which he acts, as in the project Acquerelli per non sprecare la vita continued since2006, composed of heterogeneous interventions from drawing to painting, from sculpture to workshops in schools, in streets and squares filled with thousands of people. It is, in fact, a great choral work on the need to save water, enacted also through actions such as putting up posters, as happened in Bergamo and the surrounding province in 2016, upon the social media campaign by Bergamo-based company Uniacque.
In all its variations, Stampone’s work always aims at creating communication and sharing with others. Even when it appears in private settings, it becomes public art, as it contains signs and contents aimed at activating a relational network in which the body-sign of art becomes individual-society.
