For his first solo show in an Italian museum, Pierson has opted for a highly radical choice, directing the public’s full attention towards the installations composed of letters and sentences. The 14 pieces have been created specifically for this event and have never been exhibited anywhere else in the Country.
They represent a consistent corpus and set Pierson’s poetic choices in a conceptual framework rather than a figurative one. This series, defined as Word Sculptures and begun in 1991, uses discarded objects retrieved from old signs belonging to movie theatres, supermarkets, casinos, and abandoned industrial factories. The series creates sentences and simple words, proposing multiple meanings while evoking personal images in the viewer. Their aesthetics has deep roots in the Seventies’ Pop Culture, and the very use of objects drawn from everyday life links such aesthetics to great artists, including Rauschenberg and Warhol. It has to be said that the used letters are an expression of the industrial production of our time. Either Baroque or straightforward, the letters’ shapes belong to the lettering’s aesthetic, traditionally used in street furniture and the signs that populate every city in the world. Their familiar and yet obsolete appearance is an evident symbol of the consumism that plagues our era and times.
The rust, corrosion, and paint discoloration are nothing but the same timely erosions found in the apples and leaves depicted in Caravaggio’s fruit basket, four hundred years later. This fading and the phantasmatic change of hues bring the viewer back to a nostalgic world. It is clear that everything resurfaces from past times, yet nothing can bring the object and its original function back to life. By now, as fragments of a drifting shipwreck, the letters fluctuate on the plastered walls of galleries and museums, and their wandering in space stops briefly, secured on safe land. However, nothing is eternal, and they might just leave for other journeys. Their humble aesthetic is still elegant, and everything is nobilitated by the meanings given to the letters, pulled together to form words or even sentences. They are exclamations, fragments of conversations heard or stolen from the street, cliches, or simple hints. Their application on walls is determined by a precise aesthetic, which the artist uses as flowers on ikebana. The elegance of their arrangement sets his words in a real world’s space, turning what others may mistake for useless industrial scraps into haiku poetry.
Jack Pierson (Plymouth, 1960) is an American artist mainly known for his photographs both in the artistic and advertising field. In International Galleries, he is known for his installations created with letters retrieved from discarded street signs, forming sentences and words. “Self Portrait” (2004) is his most known photographic series. Exhibited at the Whitney Museum in New York, this series’ artworks appointed Pierson as one of the most prominent artists of his generation. Being active inside the group known as the Boston School since the Eighties, he is often associated with David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca di Corcia, Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and the Starn brothers. With them, Pierson has been determining the poetic of this Century’s American photography, whose primary and fundamental component is depicting everyday life and its diverse affective spheres – family, companions, or friends. His works are a proud part of these museums’ collections: Museum of Contemporary Art Miami, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MoMA New York, Whitney Museum New York, Metropolitan New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute Chicago, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and many others.
The catalogue was published on the occasion of Jack Pierson's first museum exhibition in Italy and includes critical essays by Andrea Busto, David Rimanelli, and Sebastien Theroux.
