Giovanni Motta: When We Were Younger

Editorial is open for submissions: [email protected]

By Ivan Quaroni – art critic and curator

Giovanni Motta was born in Verona in 1971. Jonny Boy is the inner child who exists and lives in the soul of every human being. Jonny Boy is the protagonist of my adventures. I am interested in trying to connect people with their inner child using any available technique, painting, sculpture, digital animation, 3d printing. I’m interested of emotional memory and the connection with the objects of life that often represent lived experiences. I live in a cartoon.

Hug Me
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In the soul of every human being there is a deep desire to be loved and the embrace is the strongest gesture of love that exists. It should always be available but often and especially now it seems impossible to have it.v

You are the eternal child, who sees everything with marvel, everything as for the first time.

Giovanni Pascoli, Il fanciullino

You can choose to change and allow miracles to come forward in your life.

Joe Vitale, Expect Miracles

“Creativity is not peripheral”, says Bruce Mau, an innovative, committed Canadian designer in the application of design principles to the most diverse fields, health, education and safety. According to Mau, in fact, to create it is necessary to forget about technology, avoiding the software that are now available to everyone, and trying to think about with his own head. One of the most fatal errors in art consists in confusing innovation with mere novelty, but it is a mistake that Giovanni Motta has never done. His artistic research makes use of technology in a sensitive way, however, without ever taking over on the creative and fantastic aspect or on the purely handcrafted content of work. The technology is simply a tool that abbreviates the time of realization, but not necessarily those of design, and that helps the artist to shorten the path between the idea and the artifact that represents it.

Giovanni Motta’s studio resembles a technological laboratory because to realize his sculptures, the artist uses tools sophisticated, as chisels and 3D printers. This does not mean, however, that the entire process is automated. All the other things, the craftsmanship of the modeling in sculpture, as well as the acrimonious technique of the miniature (and of serigraphy) in the field of painting are the traditional ones. His is a deeply humanistic research, in which the fusion of art and technique leads to amazing results, but of which, fatally, or perhaps fortunately, the observer cannot notice. Something of similar happens in the works of Takashi Murakami or Jeff Koons, in which iconic impact overwhelms, and indeed obnubila, the technical details of the production. In essence, the final form cancels the process and frees the object from the ideative, conceptual and structural assumptions that preside over the his creation, to let the amazement and wonder of the images, key elements of his way of understanding art.

Forgetting
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JonnyBoy is the inner child. Life passes between experiences and passions. The objects of memory have a profound meaning for each of us because they are charged with our vital energy and remind us who we are and where we come from, they are around us and contaminate our relationships. This first work starts the path into the exploration of the child’s essence that hides in our soul.

All of Giovanni Motta’s work revolves, in fact, around nature. Prodigious of human existence, to the portentous quality, and at times terrifying, of life itself, to that particular energy that in adulthood it seems to become dull and drastically depowering, but that is, instead, vivid and pulsating during periods of childhood and pre-adolescence. It is a theme that boasts of boundless publicity and that starts from virtually from the mythological formulations of the puer aeternus and arrives until the recent theories about Indigo Children. In between there is obviously great part of Western fantasy literature – from the Little Prince ofSaint-Exupéry at Carroll’s Alice and Barrie’s Peter Pan – but also of the immense production of Japanese manga and anime, which has practically redefined the physical and psychological identity of childhood in the era post-atomic. The artistic and visual universe of Giovanni Motta is, directly and indirectly, influenced by these cultural references, such as the can be inferred from the physiognomy of his monsters and his children, debtors of the fantastic and futuristic imagery of cartoons animated by Go Nagai and especially Hayao Miyazaki’s films. And yet, not the formal language of the manga is the real motive of his research, the one, to put it bluntly, that has largely shaped the work of so many contemporary artists, not just those orbiting around the KaikaiKiki, the factory of the founder of the Superflat movement, but also those who swell the ranks of some bangs of the so-called American Pop Surrealism.

Like technology, the language chosen by the Veronese artist is also above all an instrument, an expressive pretext, to investigate in depth (and in a way understandable to all) the miracle of innocence and its potentially explosive character. Giovanni Motta is interested in the recovery of emotional states, of moments that are fixed in the memory in the form of indelible memories especially in childhood and puberty, when even the tiniest of happenings have lived with great intensity. The monster then becomes the visual and imaginative transcription of an emotional magic, of a peak energy in the diagram of everyday feelings.

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