Solo Exhibition “GAME OVER play again?” Gallery Func, Shanghai

by Ivan Quaroni, art critic and curator

«Unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.» (Matthew, 18, 3)

«Summer is ending and a year goes by I’m growing up, you know I don’t like it»
(Righeira)

Painting is a “technology”. The word comes from the combination of two Ancient Greek terms, techne (art, ability) e loghía (speech, explanation), which together mean “systematic dissertation on a form of art”. In the classic concept there is no distinction between art and technique. They both include each product of human ability, whether it be painting, sculpture, architecture or any other object and tool whose construction requires practical knowledge. Later on, in the Roman culture, the concept of Ars was introduced, but also in this case with the meaning of “ability”, to which an adjective specifying the area of expertise had to be added: Ars poetica (Poetry) Ars amandi (the Art of Love), Ars venandi (Hunting) and so on. It was in the XVII century that the Florentine scholar Filippo Baldinucci wrote, for the first time, of the “fine arts where drawing is employed” referring to painting, sculpture and architecture. Nowadays, in light of the explosion of digital art, crypto art, and NFT, while we witness the exponential expansion of the expressive possibilities in the field of visual arts, we find it is spontaneous to revive the ancient definition of the Greeks. Art and technology are indissolubly intertwined in the new languages and it is not possible to be digital artists without being, at the same time, specialists who are knowledgeable about the functioning of graphic processing software, animation, and 3D modelling; specialists who are capable of moving easily among platforms like Rarible, Superrare or Opensea, which allow users to sell and buy NFT (Non Fungible Token), and the different social media where themes and topics related to the present digital Renaissance are examined in depth, a digital Renaissance which promises to redefine the concept of “fine arts” itself.

Giovanni Motta’s art falls into place in this epochal moment of transition, appearing as a practise, or a techne if you will, capable of adding the technological abilities of digital art to the artisan ones of painting in its strictest sense.

All his works of art are born in a digital environment, that is, they are the product of the use of digital processing software like Photoshop or Cinema 4D, which subsequently undergo a further process of refining in the analogic dimension of traditional painting. His works can, therefore, take the format of Jpeg, Gif or MP4 files, but they might also have the physical consistency of drawings on paper or canvas paintings, hand-crafted with an almost maniacal precision. This combination of procedures, this multimedia, not only defines the extension of his field of action but it corresponds to a programmatic will to address a much wider audience than the one conventionally restricted to contemporary art. So, Motta wants to transmit his visual message to a virtually much extended public, which includes Baby Boomers and Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z.

The theme, that is, the content of the images created by Giovanni Motta, is as simple as it is powerful: the rediscovery of the inner child, the transmission of an energizing and vital potentiality which resides in the memory of every individual. The inner child is a primordial element of the personality which has to be recovered in adult life, an emotional, impulsive, profoundly vital reservoir which has all the qualities of an archetype.

Carl Gustav Jung named it puer aeternus, the uncontrollable chaotic, passionate being, dominated by emotions. So, in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, the incarnation of the furious, orgiastic, Dionysian principle which identifies itself with the states of exaltation and spiritual and physical elation. Its shadow, its negative is the senex, the mature, disciplined, restrained, rational man, obedient to the Apollonian principle, the expression of the concepts of harmony, order, proportion. Giovanni Motta’s pictorial image, but also his existential one, is the visual translation of this courageous willpower to reinstate the inner child in the daily dimension. A reinstatement led through the mnemonic and iconographic recovery of a mishmash of transitional signs and symbols, which catapult the observer in the wonderful emotional chaos of childhood and puberty.

Since Giovanni Motta belongs to the so-called Generation X and, therefore, grew up in the Eighties, it is not surprising that the signs and codes of evolutionary age assume, for him, the shape of objects ascribable to that decade. Japanese manga and anime, American cartoons and the first video games, the user-friendly technology of the origins, with that mixture of simplicity and candor, and all the commodities catalogue of consumerism of the Eighties appear inside his paintings like epiphenomena, revelations which correspond to moods lost in the meanderings of memory, removed from the conscious layers of adult life.

The personification of Giovanni Motta’s puer aeternus is Jonny, a child who seems to come from a mangaka’s pencil, whose anatomical morphology is the typical one of a growing individual, with a minute body and a hypertrophic head. Johnny is the artist’s infantilized body double, his pubertal avatar, the inner spectre, the aesthetic build of an unconscious projection, but it is also, by extension, a signal, a symbol which indicates an absence, which underlines the injury, the wound, the laceration which torments the existence of the conformed and aligned man. Motta uses Jonny as a warning to himself and to the others, but also as an empirical demonstration that the healing, everyone’s healing, is possible through the rediscovery and the recovery of this undying entity, which sets us free from time and senescence.

With the exception of the painting entitled To be continued, in which the figure of the child is rendered with a realistic and mimetic language, the artist’s canvases show Jonny as a sort of abstract construct, like a synthetic identity, general but still customizable, designed to assume manifold aspects. In Giovanni Motta’s paintings, Jonny is a hanging, fluctuating, changing entity, who attracts in his vortex a plethora of objects, complements, appendices of his personality which reveal his tastes and passions, desires and aspirations. Jonny never touches the ground, he flies, like the virtual cowboys of William Gibson’s cyberpunk mythology, like the other Johnny, the Mnemonic, but his goal is not to break the excessive power of multinational corporations, it is to perpetuate the dimension of the game or, better, the enthusiastic experience of pleasure, whether it is linked to an object, a food, a toy, a videogame character. Also “enthusiasm” is a word deriving from ancient Greek (enthusiasmós), which means “possessed by god’s essence”, “divine obsession”. It does not indicate a simple mood, a breath of emotional participation, but rather a contagious, cheerful, overwhelming, active force which, in conclusion, allows to overcome every obstacle and to realize one’s dreams. Motta looks for the enthusiasmós which animates the inner child, he materializes it, he gives it a plastic and pictorial substance, simply because images are powerful attractors, a thousand times more efficient than words.

All art is based on ideas, the origins of every figure, the strings which program the tangible and intangible reality of works. But ideas are not concepts. They are not even words. They are images. In Giovanni Motta’s creative procedure, memory is the reservoir from which synaesthetic visions, shapes associated with tactile, olfactory, and emotional contents emerge. This type of images are not found on google, but in the profound recesses of the subconscious. Hence, at the origin of the artist’s works there is a specific mode for collecting information, a methodology of internal sounding that is, itself, a form of technology, a sophisticated contemplative instrument called meditation. Motta uses the technique of regressive meditation to “go back to previous lives” and “collect and circumscribe single events of the period of puberty”. Objects, colours, and atmospheres which are present in his paintings are pieces of information derived from meditation sessions. Memories, impressions, sensations, taken down in the form of notes and sketches, constitute, therefore, the prime material for the construction of his work.

In all the regression processes which are at the origin of these works by Motta, there are three recurring elements: video games, cartoons and summertime, all of them ascribable to experiences of joy, pleasure, fun. “I realized”, the artist confesses, “that all my time travels were about a child who wanted to play and did not want to stop, but, as we know, all games end.” By exploiting this retrospective ability, the artist tries to solve the problem of how to restore to adult life the enthusiasm of the inner child, his natural inclination to enjoyment.

His art – patiently built with the use of software and then declined in the languages of painting and sculpting – revolves obsessively around this theme. Motta uses icons of video game recreational image (from Mario Bros to Pac-Man), references to vintage toys (from soldiers to Lego, from Rubik’s cube to plastic dinosaurs) allusions to foods that children like (from cakes to hamburger, from candies to fizzy drinks), to represent those objects of desire which symbolize the Principle of Freudian pleasure (Lustprinzip)2, that is, the instinctive search for fulfillment which dominates a child’s experience.

Producing digital images is a necessary but not sufficient condition to his creative process. Images must also translate into tangible objects, in paintings and sculptures which amplify the pleasure and enjoyment of the observer through the perceptual and sensitive patency. Nonetheless, it is possible to interpret such an attitude as the expression of the will to reconnect to the great History of Art and to the creative practice in its exquisitely artisan dimension.

In all of Giovanni Motta’s paintings, the enthusiasmós is codified in the shape of the video game metaphor. The condition of the player, estranged from daily reality, is represented through the image of Jonny’s fluctuation. His hanging in the air symbolizes the dynamic flow of the game, a dimension of sensorial expansion in which the perception of time is altered by heavy doses of endorphin which reduce the levels of stress, anxiety and irritability. According to Matteo Bittanti, one of the biggest experts on Digital Game Culture, “A videogame is a happiness machine: it is specifically developed to satisfy the player by means of an instant gratification”.

But for Giovanni Motta a video game is – like toys, foods and consumer goods -, just a symbol. What matters is the player’s mood, that sensation of “divine obsession” which accompanies the moments of elation and of amazement of childhood, an emotional heritage which seems to be destined to fade in time. In a sense, the artist’s paintings, especially the most narrative ones like Hug me, Jonny & Sam or Fruit Ninja, are visual devices of vital intensification. They are antithetical to the genre of the Vanitas, the still-life paintings which alluded to the ephemeral condition of existence interpreting the memento mori of the Trappist friers, with allegorical images. Giovanni Motta’s memento vivere is like the last coin in a child’s pocket, when the writing Game Over. Insert coin to continue… appears on the screen. The coin you need to play another game. Or for another ride in the fun fair of life.

© Copyright 2021 Giovanni Motta