Wednesday Whatnot: Diego Gualandris
What Sold at Art Basel. FSB Bot attempts of Poetry. Manufacturing Bliss without Drugs. The Evangelical Pastor fighting the Italian tax system.
"I feel I may have opened a new door..." - the painter Diego Gualandris leads our phone chat with surprise and excitement. "My old ideas are leaving room to raw intrusive thoughts, and I've started to get really curious about them". I’d want to know more, but he leaves me hanging.
He and Matteo Binci are just back from Art Basel. They lost an early morning flight back to Rome and ended up flying to Naples instead. It’s the ideal impromptu escape for the curator and the artist, after the fair’s hustle and bustle.
wednesday whatnots are the new creative nosedives of do clouds feel vertigo: we leave the abstract stratosphere to plunge into the shared cultural now 🔥
Matteo and Diego are a powerhouse of the Roman contemporary art scene. “He’s my sugar daddy” - Diego jokes. As every other inseparable public pair, they can be found hiding together or quarrelling in public after an exhibition.
"Old friends are like scorpios: they can kiss or kill each other” - continues the painter.
The two men are close friends and colleagues. Their professional destinies have been magnetically linked. Yet, they seem entangled in a never ending power struggle. You need me more than I need you. You owe me more than I owe you. They are two self-destructing beasts meeting in a post-apocalyptic desert and they seem to say to us: there’s nobody out there to save us. The warm earthy colours and the geological echoes enhance their agony. It’s pure arson.
Diego was born in 1993. He comes from Albino, a small mountain village close to Bergamo in the north of Italy. His provincial upbringing was marked by the annual rites of the local church, from which he recounts some of his first commissions came from. Talking about his childhood, he recalls the mythical disco-bar “Antares” that fed all the young teenager’s fantasies, or the past aura of his father DJ’ing in the eighties to tunes exuding yuppie energy (Pertini Dance). His personal mythology in oxidised and luminescent colours has conquered the public eye in Italy, Mexico, and beyond.
In his work, fantastical creatures creep in from the shadows. There’s a bestiary of children tales he collected for his younger sister. The spectral pagan underbelly of the valley that opens up. Animal figures emerge from a magmatic substrate. Sudden passages crack from bright-coloured skies and armchairs turn into a vehicle for space exploration. The composition are porous and dizzying. It’s a prison-break: child stories narrated with the friend Basile Dinbergs help the neurotic adults escape their daily prisons.
Matteo, on the other hand, looks like a gentlemen from another century. Originally from the Marche region, he has a nurturing and elegant aplomb. His mercurial work as a curator of MACRO under Luca Lo Pinto combines the historian’s rigour and a certain maverick spark. Recently, he curated Rome’s first accelerationist exposition: “Acceleration” covered the work of prophetic graphic designer and media engineer Stefano Tamburini, who tragically died of overdose in 1986.
Matteo is Diego’s soft-spoken and down to earth alter ego. He's often alone navigating the social intricacies of the city, while Diego is rather found roaring against their doors. The painter has explored all the dark edges of the Eternal city. Now, he spreads his fire with a generous spark to the friend and the passer-by alike.
He doesn't take no for an answer, his ego is joyously hyper-trophic, but he's far from only being self-absorbed. If there's a quality to describe him, it's curiosity: "I wish I was a fly on your shoulders, I wish I could see the world from your eyes", he comments on my derailed travel itineraries.
Matteo assures me: it’s difficult to find such a hard-working bee. Diego can execute on any scale. If there’s someone you want with you in Mexico City to complete large canvas under time pressure, it’s him. A lot of people around here are just show. When he works, he’s quiet, humble and kind. You can feel he’s a maker, not another influencer. His feed is clean, his overalls stained.
I believe the two man found each other's work from a place of deep respect. They recognise the silence, the stone-like quality of the meaning-making of the other, which are all too rare in a chaotic universe of shallow and noisy self-promotion.
"For a while, it felt we were really onto something..." - Matteo told me many times. It’s 2020. Diego has just been featured at the Quadriennale “FUORI” at the grand Palazzo delle Esposizioni. He would soon win the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Life felt easy. Around us the streets were quiet. I remember that paradoxically, while COVID19 lockdowns ruled over all of us from a place of fear, Rome was suddenly becoming an interesting place.
His studio in Rome was in a old butchery shop, belonging to the wife of influential Italian banker and executive Franco Bernabé, the Quadriennale honorary president. It became Diego’s crate, the marble walls smelled of lead and paint thinner. Some nights we sang karaoke songs around an old electric piano.
One night something happened. “We made fantastic creatures edible, appetising and real” - Diego recounts. The project involved also the actor Maziar Firouzi and artist Giorgia Garzilli. The work was immersive and performative. For a night the shop returned to function. The magic of theatre run unleashed.
Today, Diego doesn’t particularly enjoy dressing up, going out and playing rebel artist’s part. I have a sense he feels like the old circus animal dragged too often into the streets: the lion is tired of being walked around for the show sake.
His current gallery - ADA Project - may have saturated his market share, around the circle of wealthy Italian collectors from Rome. He lacks a challenge. He has graduated from the young promising artists category. Maybe he feels old, after the limelight of the first taste of fame has faded. When you reach the public young, you are casted. You have a style to defend. You end up in a box. Figurative. Psychedelic. This can be soul-crashing for many. It’s so boring. Most people become shadows of their former selves at thirty years old.
They need to nurture a vitalistic tension against all odds, so they end up fighting for their dear lives like the scorpios in the desert.
So, when Diego anticipates me a new wave of his work is coming, I feel enthusiastic. Brave novelty. Intrusive thoughts… what’s not to love.
I am confident we’ll see more of him.
If you liked this profile and want to see more of this writing happening, come say hi and maybe suggest someone to feature next! D.
👾 unexplored connections
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