Fast and cool: a concise overview of high-concept objects dating from the mid-1960s to the present reintroduces New York audiences to an Italian contemporary who has pursued a formally independent—yet critically pertinent—artistic course - Gianni Piacentino - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 2002 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

With a 36-year career and more than 80 one-man and group exhibitions to his credit, Gianni Piacentino has been hidden in plain sight. His work resists simple categorization and all but invites misinterpretation, a circumstance that may in part account for his persistent low profile. Often defying prevailing currents, Piacentino arrived at certain artistic issues ahead of the crowd, and stayed to more deeply explore some of them long after the crowd had moved on. A show currently at Esso Gallery, his first in New York since the 1970s, brings together 16 freestanding "vehicles" and wall-mounted works plus one painting in a compact career survey.

Based in Turin, Piacentino emerged in the mid-`60s as one of the youngest artists associated with the nascent Arte Povera movement. A philosophy student at the University of Turin and a guide at the modern art museum there, he debuted at Gian Enzo Sperone's gallery in 1966, showing reductive objects (freestanding and comer-hung poles, X shapes, scalene triangles) made of polyester and paint on wood--in essence, residual stretcher elements from a precocious season as a monochrome painter. The works initially appeared to accord with the poverist disdain for illusionism, self-expression and traditional mastery. Seen today, self-possessed and immaculately finished with custom-mixed colors and softly lustrous surfaces, they are plainly at odds with Arte Povera's studied nonchalance, not in the least anti-object but iconic and insistent on attentive perception. By the end of 1968, Piacentino and Arte Povera parted ways.

A more apt context in which to situate the 1960s projects is the realm of similarly category-resistant works by a far-flung confraternity of independent artists. Piacentino's art may bring to mind California Finish Fetish, the work of John McCracken in particular, in its conjunction of abstraction and fastidious handwork (not to mention the shared car cultures of L.A. and Turin, Italy's Motor City). Set high in a corner of Esso Gallery, the 57-inch Pink-Gray Small Pole IV (1966) articulates the volume of space as would a comparably positioned fluorescent tube by Dan Flavin, albeit with an impact as contained and Albertian as the latter's would be radiant and theatrical.

Piacentino's pair of centrifugal cross-shaped compositions from 1965, each constructed of four pieces of painted wood, propose an identity of surface and support, anticipating Mangold's " " paintings of the early 1980s. His pared-down "portals," "tables" and "reading-desk objects" are less literal than Artschwager's furniture-based sculpture of roughly the same time but skirt the same Minimalism-meets-the-real-world territory. The "window objects" (the current show features a slender example painted an elegant purple-gray) may even bring to mind Ellsworth Kelly's 1949 Paris window. They share a provocative hybridization of sculpture and painting as well as a fascination with the mutual implication of structure and aperture. Most akin to Conceptualism is Dark Purple-Gray Three Dimensions (1966), a triple-pronged construction that stands like a room-sized antecedent for Sol LeWitt's variations on the incomplete open cube.

In 1969 Piacentino began to customize racing motorcycles. The experience catalyzed a sculptural foray into the iconography of racing vehicles and airplanes; the aerial musings culminated, late in 1972, with a resumption of painting that reemployed the monochrome canvas as a field for meditations on flight. By then, he had been competing professionally in motorcycle races for a year. The heart of the Esso show is a group of mixed-medium vehicle sculptures (the largest stretching more than 11 feet) and smaller vehicle prototypes, ranging in date from 1970 to 2001. Low-slung, sometimes little more than a streamlined chassis, they evoke competition motorcycles and Formula One race-cars but are fundamentally abstract, impossibly narrow and anything but tough-skinned. Complementing the vehicles are eight wall works, large and small, most of which function as aviation tributes and involve a recombinant vocabulary (wings, bars, propellers, laurel crowns, grilles, lines of velocity) that conjures up heraldry, military insignia and Roman--indeed, Fascist--architectural ornament.

Years before the postmodernist rehabilitation of Mario Sironi, Giuseppe Terragni and Fascist-era design in general, Piacentino began to plumb a theme suspect in Italy since the first generation of Futurists went to war in the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists. Well before the advent of post-Pop commodity sculpture, Piacentino, working in series, replaced the artist's signature with a set of trademarks--his initials or his name, often rendered with a cursive flourish, that loosely emulate the classic logos of MG, Ford and Fiat. But even as theorists of the simulacrum and the surrogate aimed to pull the rug out from under objects of desire, Piacentino's vehicles remained untouched by irony or doubt: they are meant to be desirable, and they are openly gendered.