Italian artist Luca Massaro has been building a solid body of work on ‘the invisible space that separates an image from its caption, photographs from words, in their different forms of production, translation and transmission’.
Through an eclectic array of photographs, words, sculptures, installations and artists books, concocted with advertising techniques of manipulation, borrowed from the urban and online accelerated mediascape, such as the proliferation of backlit devices, the repetition of graphic logos and leitmotifs, his work plays with the conflicting hybridization of iconotexts today.
Dizionario is a long-term project: every ten years the artist will publish a volume that assembles around 1000 new images accumulated in the previous decade from his personal archive. This verbo-visual archive, a collision of signs, layers and transparencies, which creates abstract images out of language, is used as a matrix for the fabrication of new works with various materials.
texts by Federica Chiochetti, Franco Bifo Berardi