Gennaro Barci is an artist, an extraordinary creative soul of Italian origin. Â
Summary
The creative journey of Gennaro Barci
According to Gennaro, art comes from the union of our thoughts with the artistic act that materially gives life to the work.
In fact, the artist states that there is an almost symbiotic link between these two elements, since art without thought would be a mere game, whereas, by contrast, thought alone would lead us to what we call philosophy.
Gennaro’s career path has been linear, homogeneous without any abrupt changes of direction.
In fact, the artist, now 36, has been working in the art world since he was 21, turning his passion into a job.
Gennaro’s creativity has grown and transformed with him; it evolves continuously, like the subjects of his own works.
In 2006, Barci first approached abstract painting, particularly action painting.
His works sought to express concepts related to the immaterial, to the limit of human perception. According to the author, the objectification of the creative act is a means by which it is perhaps possible to go beyond the limits of physical perception.
It was only a few years later that Gennaro began to paint on transparent mediums and he defines his artistic period as follows:
“The act of painting, understood as the expression of an unconscious thought, imprinted on a transparent medium, became matter to be modelled. Sculpture was the means by which I brought that unconscious pictorial expression back to a physical plane in order to make it ‘usable’’.
The approach to digitalÂ
This interest in the “immaterial” aspect of reality led Barci to search for a synthesis, to the point where, during the pandemic, he set aside the act of painting in favour of non-colour: black.
The artist then began to model shiny black methacrylate sheets and focus his research on form.
His interest moved closer and closer to concepts linked to the limits of space and time, seen as illusory elements linked to the physical body. The shapes in his latest works are in fact less “defined” and tangible, the folds harder and more invasive, in an attempt to tell of a shape in continuous evolution, as are all things in nature.
This then gave rise to his interest in the digital form, which Gennaro himself considers almost a direct consequence of his research.
Barci defines the value of the virtual world as follows:
“The virtual world makes it possible to break down the space/time limits that characterize contingent reality, so, for example, a ‘static’ sculpture can acquire a fourth dimension: time”.
According to Barci, digital art and traditional art will have to find a balance over time, a way to coexist, since they have different objectives and satisfy different needs of the user and the artist.
The artist argues that digital art is almost seen as complementary to traditional art in that it helps to achieve goals that cannot be achieved with the physical, but at the same time the grandeur and emotion that a physical sculpture transmits to the viewer, for example, cannot be achieved with the digital.
Gennaro is keen to emphasise that, according to him, there cannot be a total abandonment of the physical medium, there cannot be a sharp and drastic leap forward because his techniques cooperate with each other but are not fungible.
There will therefore be works that can only be used digitally, and others that will remain physical, thus giving the art world a heterogeneous and diversified character.
The artist Gennaro Barci in the NFT world
The artist believes strongly in the potential of NFTs especially as strong substitutes for what we have always called “certificates of authenticity of the work”.
Barci argues that this could certainly be one of the most plausible scenarios in the near future as blockchain technology definitively solves what has always been a real scourge in the art world: the counterfeiting of artworks.
Gennaro Barci’s first NFT is available on Foundation, but many more interesting projects are on the way.
