With Così Fan Tutte, Italian artist Riccardo Nannini a.k.a Cane, has brought his colourful, imaginative and deliciously Martian sensibility to La Plataforma gallery in Barcelona’s creative district of Poblenou.
Aliens abound in Cane’s work. They are there, as undaunted intruders in everyday situations, walking pets even stranger than themselves, airing their intimacy on the internet, participating in solitary demonstrations in public streets where they display absurd banners.
The 40-year-old Italian artist sees in them “this other, radically different, who lives with us and reminds us by his presence how strange everything is, starting with what is apparently the most normal, and also how inhomogeneous the world we live in is, fortunately”. He himself feels a little alien, if only because he projects a frankly peripheral view of reality, brimming with humour, imagination and bittersweet tenderness.
Così Fan Tutte
These days, the artist Riccardo Nannini, better known as Cane (“dog”, in Italian, because there is something subtly dog-like in his work and in his attitude towards life) presents his exhibition Così Fan Tutte at La Plataforma, a contemporary art gallery that Claudia Costa runs in Barcelona’s creative district: Poblenou. This is the artist’s most recent work “more focused on the immediate present”, as Nannini himself tells us. A dozen paintings in different formats with a common thread: “narcissism, individualism and the compulsive and addictive behaviours that are characteristic of our society and which become even more evident on social networks”.
A sample of Riccardo Nannini’s colourful and Martian art, Cane
For Cane, the algorithms introduced by networks such as Facebook and Twitter since 2015 have hopelessly transformed the universe in which we live. Today we are immersed in a reality that is “more tense, more fragmented, consumed by ideological sectarianism, incapable of agreeing on almost anything because it is increasingly difficult for us to look beyond our own navels”. This somewhat stark vision of contemporary reality is channelled through a series of prints steeped in pop surrealism, indebted, according to Cane himself, “to the Californian lowbrow scene of the 1980s”, which is one of the main sources of inspiration for his work. His art is friendly, accessible and luminous, with a vibrancy and colour that seduces the retina, but with a depth that goes straight to the brain.
All roads lead to art
Cane came to art following a somewhat tortuous itinerary. He remembers himself drawing at a very early age, curiously following his grandfather’s progress in painting (“who began to paint for fun after he retired”) or going to a Gauguin exhibition with his mother, although his first love affair came when he read the comics of the Italian master Benito Jacovitti. However, when he reached adulthood, influenced by the inclination towards technical professions that predominated in his family, he chose to study engineering. From there he moved on to Industrial Design and Fashion Design, and he also became involved in the urban art scene in Milan at the turn of the century.
“I’ve always had a very strong artistic inclination, but it took me a long time to find my personal way of channelling it. I tried comics and graffiti, I had a first mature project that tried to mix photography and other plastic arts…”.
In the end, he found his current path in Barcelona, where he arrived in 2009. The Cane project was born five years later, a child of the circumstances and stimuli he found in his adopted city. A self-taught painter, Nannini considers that he always had the ideas, but that it has taken time and effort to develop the technical skills that have allowed him to express them adequately:
“I felt close to the pop surrealism of artists from the Barcelona scene like Sergio Mora or Joan Cornellà, but I was aware that they had a training that I lacked. So I looked for my own path, more conceptual and caricatural, until I was able to equip myself with the necessary expressive resources and consolidate my style”.
Purple Versus Yellow, No Matter the Reason of the Fight, one of Cane’s most representative works.
Sísifo y su influencia en Cane
A recurring element in his work has been, almost from the beginning, the myth of Sisyphus. This is how he himself comments on it:
“For me, it is a perfect metaphor for the absurdity of our lives. We stubbornly climb the rock to the top of the hill again and again, only to drop it and start all over again. This obsesses me and, at the same time, serves me to relativise things and take life with humour and a sceptical distance”.
His stage name, Cane, is a tribute to the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, master of the art of living with a reflective joy and without expectations. “I also find the attitude of Diogenes in street art, the popular culture of the West Coast of the United States, grunge… Even punk, with its cynicism and nihilism,” says the artist.
Details of the painting Purple Versus Yellow, no matter the reason of the fight of Cane
They are traditions that he feels he has inherited and that coexist in happy promiscuity in one of his most ambitious works, exhibited at La Plataforma. It is Purple vs Yellow. No Matter the Reason of the Fight, a large painting reminiscent of the costumbrist altarpieces of Flemish culture: Purple vs Yellow.
“I was inspired by several engravings depicting the battle of Antietam, a key and bloodiest engagement of the American Civil War. It depicts various groups of characters fighting each other, but also fraternising, dancing or playing chess”.
A choral work that reduces war to a series of microscopic and puerile quarrels, imbued, once again, with everyday absurdity. And it eloquently shows how attractive Cane’s alien gaze can be.
Cane knows how to disguise his reflections on the world we live in with gentle humour.
Poblenou, a different place
For Claudia Costa, the Italian artist is very representative of the type of work she wants to exhibit in her gallery, La Plataforma.
“I like art with a conceptual richness, whether abstract or figurative, and above all with a very contemporary sensibility,” he says.
She herself is the curator of this room that is committed “to artists with local roots, connected to the Barcelona scene”. The Platform also functions as a launch pad for an ambitious project, baptised Poblenou Urban District, which “aims to be a space of interconnection for the cultural and creative initiatives that exist in this District, one of the most dynamic and with the greatest potential in Barcelona”.
Claudia Costa portrayed in La Plataforma.
The private association, founded by Gloria Morera, Ana Laura Solís and Costa herself, was based to some extent on what was happening ten years ago in Miami’s Wynwood Art District. “It’s not a good reference now because of gentrification and it’s lost a lot of what was really genuine, but it was a reference then. We thought Poblenou could be Barcelona’s Wynwood Art District because it was historically an industrial area with a strong creative community.
They were pioneers. Claudia considers that Poblenou in 2020 and 2021 “has suffered the impact of the pandemic, which has forced many local neighbourhoods to close down, although right now it is an area in full effervescence”. Their big bet is that the 22@ district, known as the city’s technology and innovation centre, will coexist with the Cultural and Creative District which we are promoting through its community and the programming of different cultural events”. They aspire to “coexist without being phagocytosed”. And to continue bringing to the neighbourhood such stimulating offers as Cane’s alien and playful work.
Address of La Plataforma: Carrer Pujades 99, 08005, Barcelona, Spain
