about.

STUDIO STEFANIA MISCETTI presents a collection of new works by Adrian Tranquilli in the exhibition don’t forget the Joker.

It has been five years since Believe and Evidence – Tranquilli’s one-man exhibitions at Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni and at this gallery – initiated a series of works dedicated to the exploration of the heroic figure and the superhero in particular. The artist tackles the same theme here, but from a different perspective: his analytical point of view has rotated through180 degrees and now concentrates on the antihero.

The concept of the superhero as sole universal representatives of ethical heroism has in recent years been the focal point of both Adrian Tranquilli’s work and of his thorough, committed anthropological analysis of this cultural role model.
Having removed their comic book associations, the artist has revised the nature and meaning of his characters and proposes them as icons and paradigmatic elements which connect on many levels: reality and imagination, antiquity and the future.
Each sculpture arises from life, from social utopias and from the contemporary world’s “sacred” visions. They are related to religion, anthropology and art history, to current affairs and science. Hence Batman, Superman and Spiderman live on an absolute plane, establishing the symbolic event in constructions of great visual impact.

The Joker, that well-known “villain” from the universe of superhero comics, is the leading character in this exhibition:
“I have always thought of the Joker as the perfect, mirror-image transposition of the superhero concept. The superhero represents the comic book transposition of the West’s role model of the male rescuer, the keeper of the good and the just. Superheroes are inevitably ambiguous figures, they are convinced they can judge and punish. Their counterparts, the super-villains, are ambiguous in much the same way. The Joker is the perfect synthesis of this ambiguity. The Joker – a balladeer, juggler, musician and acrobat – actually has a positive image but he’s on “the other side”, the negative side. The boundaries between positive and negative are as ephemeral as the concepts of good and bad themselves; everything is possible and nothing is true.”

The exhibition is a complex site-specific installation where light and shadow contrast and interrelate with large black and white images, re-examining the canons of theatricality and interactivity. Tranquilli thereby creates a meaning which is both playful and tragic. A large sculpture of the Joker introduces us to the scene and seems like a witness to the works dedicated to the superheroes.

Read and download the exhibition’s press release.

works.

here below some images from ADRIAN TRANQUILLI’s don’t forget the joker.