04 Oct Interviewing Davide Gianquitto | From Architecture to 3D and Digital art
Biography
Davide Gianquitto was born in Naples in 1953. He started his journey into the artistc world starting from music, to then enter in Naple’s University of Architecture and complete there his studies. The analysis and deepening of forms, colors, lights and shadows has inevitably led him to experiment with new techniques and artistic technologies to arrive at new graphic results in advertising and digital art.
Gianquitto is a perfect example of art experimentation and pursuit of the technological process. An architect and photographer who started from the analog machine, has gone to the digital one, finally arriving at 3D modeling and virtual manipulation.
Davide Gianquitto
The Interview
Your artistic path was born from a professional passion that, later on, came together with your work as Architect. Could you tell us more about how this profession helped beginning your art journey?
One of the fundamental elements of art in my opinion is form; architecture itself is form in its noblest expression and the architect is called to shape spaces giving them a meaning that through form, precisely, is expressed. The search for form has been a constant in my professional and then artistic life. Since my first pictorial representations I have “played” with the form, now exalting it, now dissolving it, now folding it to the creative process of the moment.
In addition to this, I have always had a passion for image in all its artistic and architectural forms, and I have extended my activity as a design architect to creative advertising design. The real beginning of my artistic activity coincided with the creation of the institutional catalog of a company that produced fashion accessories. On that occasion I used the emerging digital/photographic technologies in an alternative way to obtain new and original images. At that time I created digital painting works on various themes that I presented in my first solo exhibition entitled “Luce, Colore, Ombra” held in 2002.
After tha, I continued my research which resulted in the current use of 3D modeling to which I later joined also algorithmic computational modeling (without the use of artificial intelligence); these techniques have a remarkable closeness to the rules of harmony and musical composition that also have always been part of my life, as a musician and composer, devoted to the study of piano from an early age and later classical guitar.
At some point during your journey, 3D modeling also came along. How do you think this tool can give new characters to the works?
Three-dimensional modeling is definitely a rich and stimulating way of rappresenting a scene since it is at a different level of conception and perception. A traditional painting or drawing is a three-dimensional representation on a two-dimensional medium, once conceived it is perceived as it was constructed. In three-dimensional creation the scene is only one of the possible innumere scenes that can be represented. The matrix is alive and offers multiple possibilities of perception since the work is conceived as an organism that can muchange its way of being perceived depending on the point of observation, lights, shadows of chiaroscuro, halftones and all the factors that influence its representation.
When three-dimensional modeling is combined with algorithmic computational modeling, a further level of enrichment is achieved in the conception of the scene that is to be represented. For example, an object, while remaining as such in its function can take on so many forms and therefore relate to the other components in multiple ways.
In your works we can identify very different themes, just like Mannequins and Reflections. What’s the correlation between them and the contemporary world?
I believe that art has always somehow reflected the historical and cultural context of the era in which the artist lives; art and contemporary reality, therefore, are not two separate entities in my creative process, but merge to define a narrative, as happens in the themes you mentioned, but sometimes evocative, through the expression of pure and suggestive forms that tell the inner feelings of the I-man, expressing an almost dreamlike dimension that belongs to the “serene” or “agitated” dream of contemporary reality, as happens in some of my abstract works.
Regarding the themes you suggested, depending on the context, the Mannequin represents the depersonalization of the subject so that it can represent anyone or the man (understood as mankind) who has homogenized himself by losing individual characteristics and behaviors to conform to dominant trends. The result of homologation is an ordinary man (or woman), the cog in a system that lacks structure and personality. In the course of life a man by character or force of circumstance can become a dummy except to regain his or her own characteristics and become an individual again. There is an imaginary, often slippery road, a path, at the end of which we find a kind of mirror, which gives us back a confused but distinguishable image of our opposite. In that moment we can decide who we want to be or who we want to become.
A Mirror can also be a representation of a dream, a dreamlike and surreal vision, an image suspended between wakefulness and sleep, merged and interpenetrated in a harmonious and profound way, to reach that space of “higher reality,” of “surreality” where thought and imagination are free to roam.
In one of my paintings entitled I’“Reflected Tree,” I depicted a leafy tree reflected in a body of water showing the reflection of a bare tree.
The philosopher Heraclitus divides the world into awake and sleeping: those who can go beyond appearances and those who cannot grasp the essence. Everything flows, transforms. One opposite cannot exist without the other. A bare tree in winter reaches its opposite in summer, when it is covered by lush foliage. A reflection seen beyond appearances can reveal to us the very becoming of things.
On the theme of mirrors (very dear to me) I have also constructed two precise themes. The first “Premonitory Mirror” that anticipates in its reflection future events, the second “Revealing Mirror” that shows in its reflection a hidden or unpresentable side. In one of my paintings entitled “Climate Change” I depicted an ordinary room and its image in the premonitory mirror some years later.
In the mirror one can see that time has passed, the paint yellowed and peeling, the wooden window replaced with a more modern one made of white aluminum; other signs of time in the room, the broken and glued vase, a few stains, everything in short in the natural order of things crossed by the passage of time. Outside the window, on the other hand, there is no natural order but the result of violence on the balance of nature.
What are the limits that can be overcomed thanks to technology and 3D art that you use?
I think that some of this information has been also said previously, anyway, with these technologies we can obtain creative products that are the sum of re-elaboration which combine the scene with single elements and allow the visitor to discover a relationship between Art and Math in these shapes. The choice of numerous scenes that 3D modeling offers, together with the infinite variables of the shapes (thanks to algorithmic computational modelling) offers the artist a great variety of opportunities of which just one will be chosen with his sensibility, leaving this to be an open matrix for future interpretations.
What are your projects for the future?
I obviously intend to deepen and develop the Themes that now interest me, and to face more and new by the time, because creativity and art never stop. At the same time I’m planning a series of event and exhibitions both personal and collective, other than those already in process. Anyway, I hope to share my artistic message arriving to a greater and different public.
The artist exhibited some works in a solo exhibition titled “Light Color Shape” held at the Pappacoda Chapel by invitation of the University of Naples L’Orientale. He also exhibited in various group exhibitions, including one at the Municipal Art Gallery of Gaeta.
Gianquitto also participated in the “Open House Architecture” exhibition circuit, presenting a selection of his digital works to the public.
The most recent exhibition in which we can find Davide Gianquitto’s artworks is the collective one “Colori Forme ed Emozioni” in October 2024 in Capri, organized by Associazione Socio-Culturale “Napoli Nostra” with the patronage of Anacapri Municipality.