Piero Golia
05/06/2003 > 19/07/2003
Opening on 04/06/2003, from 6 pm to 9 pm
Born in 1974, of course in Naples, PIERO GOLIA endeavours through his actions and installations to build his own legend, handling artfulness and generosity, humour and poetry. His works cultivate a great immediacy and aim to reach the biggest number; thus they are told about as much as they are looked at. Between folie des grandeurs et folie douce he stages his aspiration to posterity in a way that is at the same time spectacular and derisory.
With PIERO GOLIA art becomes the place where everything is possible: an artistic proposition can move mountains, or, as it happens for this exhibition, the whole façade of a building. Dismounted for the occasion in Amsterdam and hanged as a painting on a wall of the gallery, it overcomes the rules of painting, architecture, and even physics. Entitled It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, in reference to the mythical album of the rap band Public Enemy, it demonstrates that nothing, or almost, can stop the artist.
Sitting nearby and responding to the façade’s monumentality, a skeleton adorned with PIERO GOLIA’s attributes (diamond inlaid into a tooth,rings) seems to add that art is not only the place of all possible, but also the place where to engrave one's own presence in history and not disappear. Maybe not Even a Nation of Millions : afterall there may be nothing, really nothing, that can stop PIERO GOLIA.