Milan. Sunsets on Instagram and site-specific installations

“New Blabs on Clouds and Planes” is the title of Simone Monsi’s forthcoming solo exhibition at the Spazio Leonardo in Milan. The artist focuses on abnormal atmospheric phenomena, which often derive from air pollution, investigating their media and aesthetic dimension. For example, the sunset on Sunday 29 October 2017 was probably the most Instagrammed in history. The surreal scenario, with the sky changing between red and magenta colour, has been shared by millions of people. The sunset assumed an autonomous dimension in social networks, perhaps even more impacting than the atmospheric phenomenon itself.

Monsi, who recently obtained a MFA at the Goldsmiths University in London, materialises images and texts taken from social networks in site-specific installations. Rossella Farinotti, author of a critical text for the exhibition, writes: “The visual action of Simone Monsi re-elaborates widespread and unearthed messages from the Internet. The artist regains possession of images of different types, which he obsessively collects for a personal cataloging, with an almost inductive method: from the general to the particular. Monsi is attracted by the collective thinking, making it intimate, and bringing it to itself and re-indexing it as a calm, almost pleasant, critical complaint.”