Angelo Zani

Description and analysis of the context (if you love books let them free)

The idea of creating a large open and shareable library is the basis of this proposal. It comes from the so called “bookcrossing” which is very popular in the USA. It is very simple :you can leave a book anywhere, on a bench, on the train or bus, wherever it can be seen and taken, and after reading you can write your review on the website (http://www.bookcrossing.com/).
A community of book lovers meet virtually on the Internet to donate and / or receive books, in turn, given and / or received as many times as there are new readers and donors. The book begins its journey, as well, whose steps are related to the movement of those who find , read , and then leave it back to the adventure of a new player.
"Realease Books" has got the same purpose: sharing books, completely free, as a fundamental assumption.
Believing that even” through small things you can transform the cities"




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A silent process of insects extinction has been going on for a few decades. It has sped up so much recently that it can be considered as an ecological disaster. That is the symbolic subject of this work along with a warning for the need to take care of our “friends” and the environment that we share. Just because in the future the Nature might be as unconcerned about flies dying out as about the homo sapiens extinction.

The PVC table , painted with dry chalks, represents a water mirror where all the flies for fishing lie forming the message: THE END. Below the flies the DDT “VITTORIA” FLIT dates back to the times when it was used to reclaim the land, carelessly of its noxious side effects.

Man and space are in a reciprocal relationship animated by time and energy emanated by the forms during anamorphosis processes. In operational terms the carved relief, investigating the forms assumed by the wings of flying seagulls show the spatial pattern of forces in tension.
(Dry chalks, marble powders and ceramics, glaze on paper and forex)

A simple piece of barbed wire. By itself, it evokes imprisonment, concentration camp and oppression. Through historical accumulation it has become a metaphor for political violence and censorship. It’s a symbol which recalls a set of representations exceeding the simple object.
After his liberation from Auschwitz ,Primo Levi said: “Freedom. The breach in the barbed wire gave us its tangible image”.
The blue background symbolizes this freedom by returning to the light blue as Minerva’s colour.
Again, Athena-Minerva gives her name to the owl (Athene noctua)which in Greek and Roman mythology was the attribute of the goddess of wisdom ,was the symbol of clairvoyance and the light after the solution of a problem. That’s why, in the nineteenth century, with Hegel, the owl became the symbol of philosophy.
Its plaintive call, which I sometimes hear in the morning, announcing the rising sun, sounds to me like a message of hope.

Lossa Ernst (1929 - 1944), died at the age of 14 years in a Nazi anmental hospital where he was a “cavia”. He survived more than any other, "stealing" moments of life from the horrors of Kaufbeuren nursing home, one of the centres of Aktion T4 (the so-called Nazi euthanasia). In order to caress his big heart, I have "revitalized" an old photo found on the Internet, in style of Pop Art, and highlighting the depth of his sweet eyes.

“How deep is the sea”
Trash Art (Marble powders, granules and milled glass, carbon, ash, dry chalks, aluminium glitter)

Two integrated elements on interpretative plan are in this work: the disappearance of depth (entropy) and the content of information (exergy). The use of waste, as raw material, is essentially a negentropy action, namely the attempt to bring order to the "confusion" generated by the human action. The art in action makes a fundamental gesture when it retrieves the residual content of information (exergy) from raw materials. It’s very interesting from an engineering perspective, while from an artistic standpoint, the rediscovery of depth sounds like criticism to modern life, which takes place mostly “on the surface", made of pulses supplied by the consumer society
To counter this entropic "slippage", even of contemporary culture (often there is no depth, there is no hidden meaning, there is only the case), it is necessary to recover the "se



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“All dreams fly” - "Le dessin d'un enfant c'est un peu de son ame", wrote Eduard Claparéde in 1913. The act of drawing for a child is a need as well as for a prehistoric man who painted on the cavern walls. When we grow up we start straying from our unconscious and everything is reorganized and labelled by our reason thus loosing genuineness. Both children and graffiti writers depict their state of mind, needs, hopes, fear and joy, sometimes even anxiety. Through their drawings they both transform the real world by mastering it. Actually they are the true artists as “they can keep in touch with the childish side of themselves” (Masal Pas Bagdadi).

My "creative engineering” project started last year with a painting ("Gardez mon souvenir") about the connection between macro and microcosm, symmetry and asymmetries; now the “table of mounting” is designed and painted on an original plotting (1936) with a by Brown Boveri.
Placed on the top the intricate “maps of science” that have been created by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists, like a graphic depiction of the virtual trails that the scientists leave behind when they retrieve information from online services: a kind of neurological map of the creative process. The disciplines classified by Getty Research Institute's Art and Architecture Thesaurus, are here selected and they are related in an ironically creative form.
The resulting model visualizes the relationships between various domains and “clarifies” the connection of the Power-Energy, on the one hand, Transformations-Art of the other part.

The work is conceived as an installation and should



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At present, one of the most important problems of Theoretical Physics is how to harmonise the theory of general relativity (the Einstein’s theory)about gravity applied to macrocosm (stars, galaxies), with the Quantum Mechanics which describes the three other fundamental forces of microcosm (electrons, photons, quarks). According to the theory of “superstrings”, the fundamental constituents of reality are the strings which quiver at different frequencies and orchestrate the universe evolution. This suggestive image comes from Evariste Galois’ theories, who was a great French mathematician with a fiery revolutionary spirit. In 1830 he founded the Groups theory as the key to the secrets of symmetry.
This painting, entitled with his deathwords, is dedicated to him and wants to represent the overlapping of the Orion Nebula, the brightest constellation in the night sky, and the CERN’s simulation of Higgs boson’s decay, one of the most expected experiments of this century.

Interpretare alcune opere credo sia uno spreco, un po’ come spiegare certe poesie. Tuttavia avevo inizialmente accompagnato la malcelata critica al consumismo (la “festa di non-compleanno”che in sostanza è il top del consumismo) di quest’opera con una frase ritrovata nell’ultimo manoscritto di Luigi Pintor “Nessuno conosce l’essenza degli specchi e nessuno ha penetrato il loro segreto tranne Alice nel paese delle meraviglie”. Evidentemente, dai commenti ricevuti, anche il tal modo l’”oggetto” risultò ermetico o non autoesplicativo. Allora riepilogando. Se andate a Oxford Street (Londra) trovate un negozio di profumi, a fronte la pubblicità di Chanel. Dall’interno del negozio, in un giorno di pioggia potreste vedere riflessa, più o meno, quest’immagine. Naturalmente, a differenza, trovereste scritto “Chanel”. La foto è stata scattata da mia figlia (Alice appunto). Il quadro è un unicum, il divisorio altri non è che la parete luminosa che sostiene la pubblicità. Diverso è il grado si defi..

Il giorno di Natale dello scorso anno ci ha lasciato, suicida, uno dei più straordinari cantautori e musicisti degli ultimi anni: Vic Chesnutt. Vic aveva solo 45 anni ed era paraplegico dall’età di 18. Ho ascoltato ossessivamente la sua “Flirted with you all my life”. Sembrerebbe la solita canzone d’amore. E potrebbe anche esserlo, ma dobbiamo attendere il ritornello per capire che l’oggetto del suo amore altri non è che sorella Morte. Poi sfogliando una rivista di moda ho pensato di rappresentare una morte leziosamente in posa con il suo corredo di simbologie più o meno classiche (il serpentello “peccato originale”, la falce e il simbolo di Zarathustra che sta ad indicare l’anima prima della nascita e dopo la morte), infine, una “citazione” di Otto Dix (la mano scheletrica che sostiene l’asta della falce). E’ il mio tributo a Vic.

Il quadro fa parte di progetto che ho intitolato “La vita e la morte” di cui fa parte anche “La meditazione”.

In this work I want to represent not simply the waiting for an event (in this case the waiting for the bus in Sri Lanka, where I took the photo that inspired me), but a more emblematic and pained expectation of life.

Cape Comorin is the most southern spot in India, where Gandhi’s ashes were thrown into the air. A unique sacred place for Hindu people where you can see both the sunrise and the sunset. The unmarried girls meet there on the day devoted to Shiva’s wife, Durga, and wait for the sun to rise over the ocean, wearing jasmine flowers on their hair.
The painting was made in Nov.2008 with an experimental technique: three levels of light and shade effects (the flowers, the human shapes and the choppy sea).

On a girl mind

The body has become again the core of the thoughts and images of many. Often they are scraps of paper without any sensoriality. Therefore, what about the body in the current era? Is it spectacular, simulacral, virtual, digital? It depends how it appears and how we perceive it.

I wanted to verify palpability of the “effect of the body” starting from rather afar, for example from Raoul Hausmann. The dadaist and anti-photographer Hausmann (1886-1971) has always had a special relationship with the real and the body. Particularly in his sensorial or “eccentric” view, as he defines it himself: “We see things thanks to the shade that restore their outlines”.

The image that has inspired my pictorial representation is the "Nu de dos sur une plage" a black and white photograph of half of 1920s. Respecting the presence of the body as an autonomous and real "object", I have changed, in the design, the perspective point of view. A doubly "eccentric" and





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The painting depicts a girl taking a photo of a wall outside the MOMA in N.Y.C. It has been made by different glazings which include other images reflected by the glass in front of the museum, among which Obama is visible on the right.
Made between May and June 2009, it is an example of the author’s idea of “creative engineering” paintings.

The cup of freedom

(A toolbox with Silvio's & Umberto's political gadgets for the Italians' education)

Artist's Milk

Alkoxide-based milk, persimmon, vanilla, lavender and sugar.
50 cl, 37 degrees, producing no. 13 examples.
Label drawn with antique inks and whitebait.

Draft work of art for the decoration of the hall in the new "Martino Martini" Polo school in Mezzolombardo (TN), Italy.

The work consists of art supplied elements to the 4 artistic elements around the pillars in the school atrium and of the background of a scene made with iron sheets cut out with laser technology and rusty effect.

The themes are inspired to, recasting them artistically, floral and animal decorations and textual elements contained in Martino Martini’s "Novus Atlas Sinensis" (edition published in Amsterdam in 1655) and in Jacobus Golius’s “Additamentum”.

Project for an architecture of wings

Aquarelle pencils on sheet of paper