Caterina
Piccardo
Production designer
PROJECTS AS ARTIST
When I was in Italy, I reached a great achievements as artist, I was a confirmed painter, exhibiting in several Art Galleries in Italy and working with Contemporary Artist such as Marta Dell'angelo and Christian Tripodina.
I want to share with you my Italian past as artist:
A close friend, Federico Imperiale, great photographer, decided to do a brief interview me while I was painting in my little apartment in Los Angeles.
I was several time his model for several photo shoot and he always came on my sets as BTS photographer, We have a great collaboration together.
Venus after the femminist revolution
I always consider very interesting and fascinating the body's anatomy in its aesthetic and practical perfection, especially the feminine body is began the main subject of my artistic search that it is not only based on the astonishing body perfection, but also on the historical and conceptual search developed with the female figure in the art and history time.
The product of my study can be summarized in an androgynous shape, where the academic vision of the woman totally decays.
In the art history the women shape were always explained by soft curve representing sensuality and and purity but in my vision I would describe the contemporary woman, daughter of the feminist revolution where we refund the women s strength and emancipation.
The first choice to harden the feminine forms through the muscular potentiate is interpreted as a metaphor of the feminine strength that often remains anchored to male chauvinist and old stereotypes, in spite of contemporaneity and the sexual revolution, and thus repressed and lessened.
The choice to use colors-not color as black and white, makes a statuary effect like a sculpture where light and shade even more exalt the new shape of this Venus inspired by the Classic but reinterpreted in current key.
I have exhibited my work for the Rotta Farinelli Contemporary Art Gallery in my home town Genoa, Italy.
In the Spring of 2017, precisely on May 25th 2017, at the age of 24, I exhibited for the first time my paintings at the Rotta Farinelli Gallery in Genoa, Italy.
Thirty of my paintings were exhibited and the Secolo XIX ( important Italian newspaper) took an interview of the me where I explain my work.
Here the interview in Italian. ( Find translation below)
Caterina Piccardo tells us:
" It's hard to be a woman, it's not easy.
My work is based on the concept of the female emancipation, even if in the history the woman fought for their rights and even there was the feminist revolution, anyway we still have hard time as women.
I live in Los Angeles and it's not that easy, because been a young woman, a girl, doesn't help you to find your place and space.
We are stronger then men sometimes, I don't discriminate men, I love men, I couldn't live with out, but the woman alone has her value, the contemporary woman is a woman who can be alone.
Today we are strong, independent, we can create our future and our story alone.
I found this path as a way of vent, a way of expression through my paintings which represent very strong woman, statuesque, also androgynous.
We are like nest, we are women who welcome and procreate, but we are also strong, with an idea.
My paintings are inspired by one of my high school Professor, she was very present for me and she also helped me to get out from hard teenager situation, but they are also dedicated to me.
Genoa is a very hard city, I always traveled a lot in my life, I was never settled here, I'm like a gypsy in my way, then I went to Los Angeles to prepare an exam and I fall in love with the city, because it's a very tolerant, very open mind and colored city, I mean that there I found things about me that I forgot.
It's not that easy to live here, I got back from L.A. few days ago and I have a cold sore, I'm a bit stress out, but here I have my life, my family, my friends, and my work.
This is a Hymn of a work I pursued for a year, with the owner of the gallery, with my parents, my friends and their support.
They are good paintings or bad, it depends, but there is a lot of hart into them, there's a lot of me."
Tap on the image to see the full PDF file
A mural for the Electronic Park 2016
I painted this Mural during the summer event Electronic Park organized by Tasherz Lost in Art( a Genoa-based cultural organization, https://www.facebook.com/Trasherz.org/?fref ). Through this piece of work I wanted to show women warriors ready for battle, waiting for an enemy army coming from afar. The picture represents a very personal period of intense emotional turmoil. This experience led me to better appreciate my warrior-like self-awareness.
A Pylon for Walk the Line project
I was chosen by the same organization as one of the featured artists for the "Walk The Line," a highly original and interesting project intended to give Genoa's elevated highway a "new face."
Composed of one hundred pylons, it will be painted by several Italian and European artists.
The project will be brought to completion within three years.
For more details, visit: https://www.derev.com/enjoy-walk-the-line
Here is the scale model my idea for the pylon assigned to her.
In my sketch for the project Walk The Line, I tried integrating female strength by using the pylon itself which becomes the main and most significant conceptual means to express the new emancipated Venus.
Thus, the final project will feature a colossal woman holding the highway with all of her power and might.
The highway symbolizes the efforts and fights for freedom, and the repressions which women have had to face and live with over time.
The figure has ambiguous connotations because the only feminine element is the woman's backside curve.
This is how I attempt to surprise the audience who initially believe the figure to be that of a man based on common stereotypes of perceived male strength. On closer examination, the viewer can easily distinguish the woman's figure.
Deformation: a photographic project
Back in the Fifties, there was a great photographer named Diane Arbus, a very liberated woman and a freethinker for her time.
True to her own words, “My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been,” she captured what some would consider outcasts and misfits, such as men dressed as women, circus performers, prostitutes, patients with mental disabilities, etc. In fact, despite those differences, she always developed a bond of deep friendship with each one of her subjects.
Through her highly poetic, ambiguous pictures, Arbus portrays and speaks of a parallel, eccentric world, which she felt very attracted to. Her work not only reflected her obsession with the eccentric, but was also a sort of self-portrait. She would also often use double portraits in order to express people’s duplicity, which is a central, consistent theme in her photographs.
Drawing my inspiration from Arbus’ freaks, I further elaborate on the meaning of the word itself, an English term which originally meant “whim” or “caprice.”
This word has often been used to refer to people born with physical deformities who worked in circus shows to either entertain or frighten the audience. Later in the 1960’s, the same word was borrowed by Italian just as hippies and the psychedelic movement were burgeoning. In that context, it denoted anti-conformist individuals who rejected established social ideologies.
Therefore, my photography project is based on a combination of the two following aspects: physical deformity as an element of exhibitionism and horror and psychological deformity in those who live on the edge of society by making choices and showing interest in what is usually avoided or entirely excluded.
Prejudices born of rules and mental blocks resulting from educational imprinting and stereotypes remove human beings from reality by creating potentially limited perspectives.
I intend to demonstrate how great opportunities for knowledge and personal growth may be lost because of the afore-mentioned prejudices.