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Mimmo Iacopino
Following the teaching of Dadaism, Iacopino’s works are made from elegant interweaving of unusual compositional elements, such as strips of velvet, satin ribbons or shiny lurex, multicolored moulin cotton threads, but also tailoring meters, fragments of musical scores and strips imprinted with phrases of literary texts.
They’re all materials decontextualized from their field and their function that enter the dimension of art recomposed in geometric warps inspired by arithmetic modulations, where the construction of the grid is marked by mathematical measurements that sometimes dissolve, following mathematical rules of ordered madness. In this sense, Iacopino knows how to unite the Dadaist principle of the objet trouvé, of the surprise that the spectator feels in front of the materials used by the artist, to the great abstract and geometric season of 20th century art. Each of his works is characterized by the continuous expansion of the interweaving of geometric patterns with a three-dimensional and alienating effect, accentuated by the rhythm of chromatic repetition, hypnotic and enigmatic, where each element performs the function of a multiplied sign, thus involving the viewer in an ever-changing dialogue with the pictorial matter of his art.
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His artistic experimentation, as sustained by Maurizio Sciaccaluga, has always moved between the abstract rationalist impulse to give a logical order to the world and the Dadaist practice of conferring unusual scenic presence in the artistic field to the object of daily use that the artist skillfully blends in his “Dadaist geometry”. Already in his first experiments, the experience of still-life photography (he was a student of Studio Azzurro from 1978 to 1985) taught him to look at the object in a creative and imaginative way, painting artificial compositions, still lives and weaves and then creating, with the same weaves, but of colored paper, sculpture-objects and imprinting silhouettes of objects with strokes of flash on the photographic film, as happened in Man Ray’s Rayographs.
In the works from the 2000s, thanks to the photographic skill in the digital processing of the natural image without using photomontages, colored pencils, ballpoint pens, matches and thermometers, are manipulated, intersected with each other in compositions marked by a modular geometric rhythm that will be, later, transferred to the canvas with the same procedure, but with the materials he’s best known for: velvet and satin ribbons and tailor’s meters, where the chaotic and surreal thought is rationalized through the interweaving of perpendicular lines, scanned with maniacal precision.

Works