On the occasion of the fourth edition of Rome Art Week, on October 24th 2019 it will be inaugurated at 6.30pm at the Galleria La Nica "The Downside", an exhibition that aims to bring together two artists of the same generation, but from very different backgrounds: Uğur Gallen, alias Uğur Gallenkuş, a Turkish artist who lives in Istanbul, and Jacopo Truffa, a Roman artist.
If for the latter "The Downside" will be the crowning achievement of the collaboration started in 2017, which led Truffa to participate with our gallery at the itinerant biennal Manifesta 12, for Uğur Gallen this will be by far the first official exhibition after having achieved fame through social networks and the many services and articles dedicated to him around the world.
The title "The Downside", literally "the negative side", aims to highlight the critical operation that both artists carry out against contemporary society from two different but complementary points of view. If Gallen focuses on highlighting the differences between privileged realities, where everything goes - or seems to go - well, and those where the oppressed live in "pain, hunger and war", Truffa shows with sharp irony what lies behind the world of mass and social media, a world made of approval addiction and where the war is made online.
The use of computers in the work of both artists is also different but complementary. In the "Parallel Universe" cycle, in fact, Uğur Gallen carefully selects images of photojournalists to combine them with other images taken from the web, thus giving shape to digital-collages that he then publishes on social media, while in his "Hate in the Nation" cycle Jacopo Truffa creates "unique" three-dimensional digital works that take shape with "serial" 3D printing.
Two critical, but not cynical, glances: what they both aim at is make us awarness of all those realities and conditions usually "in the background", and give us the possibility of opening peacefully a breach in our thinking. The question is: what can we do in our own small way to make this world a better place?
"The Downside", curated by Maria Vittoria Marchetta, will be open until November 14th, 2019.
