DARIO GIANCANE
Alone
presentation and critical text by Lara Gigante
June 7th – 27th 2025
Orizzonti Arte Contemporanea Gallery
Piazzetta Cattedrale, old town, Ostuni
Humans of the future, in fact, knowing what
they will presumably know about their ancestors
on Earth, will realize that only for
a brief era, less than three centuries, a
significant number of their fellow men believed that
planets and asteroids were inert.
A.Gosh. The Great Blindness
Every surface carries with it the trace of a pressure: atmospheric, temporal, cultural. Dario Giancane’s research and practice move along this path, where the metal reacts and the form retains a time, a place, a condition.
The work develops through subtraction, resistance and exposure, without any explicit narrative claim. However, through the arrangement of the forms and voids that mark the material, a narrative emerges and implicitly makes its way.
The oxidized sheet metal, fragile and inert symbol of industry, abandonment and distance, suggests the possibility of inhabiting, containing, lasting.
So, Alone becomes not only a title, but a dry statement, without comments, a structural condition.
Object of observation in its changes in Giancane’s work, iron is not limited to being manipulated. Corrosion, loss, residue: these are events that sculpture collects without intervening. It is not, therefore, the construction itself that determines the result, but the tension that is established between the inside and the outside, between what is closed and what leaks out. The forms are essential: houses without openings, isolated volumes, objects held at the edges. They do not evoke the interior, they do not promise access. They are bodies that support themselves, suspended between functionality and failure. A reduced grammar that indirectly questions the landscape, underlying it, deprived of direct representation. What remains is the weight of a context that is not shown: that of environmental degradation, of the rarefaction of common spaces, of the fracture between subject and world. And yet, there is no condemnation. The works listen to a time that does not coincide with the present: a dilated, geological time, in which solitude is not only a psychological condition, but a relational condition. It is this perceptive modality – indirect, misaligned, resistant to emphasis – that Amitav Ghosh has indicated as a possible alternative to “cultural blindness” towards ecological collapse. It is not a narration of the crisis, but an immersion in its everyday and immanent forms. A plastic language, sculpted as much by crudeness as by urgency, makes this possible. The oxidized surface, torn by time, goes beyond the symbolism of disaster, to become a witness to a complex reality, far from rhetorical narratives. In this sense, Giancane rejects any decorative illusion, allowing the material to transform itself as a question about our relationship with time and with what seems irremediably lost. Ambivalent and reversible, however, is the meaning conveyed by the title Alone: on the one hand, solitude as isolation; on the other, the possibility of resistance. The little house without doors or windows that appears in the works takes on an ambiguous value: closed and perhaps inaccessible, but also protective, a refuge or barrier, a space that isolates and, at the same time, resistance to disintegration.
Alone thus becomes the sign of what, despite abandonment, can still resist, transform, regenerate.
The installation also fits into this perspective, not resolving the tension, on the contrary, prolonging it. The works, arranged as silent presences, let the space – in its voids and articulations – construct a reading. Each element is in relation to the other without hierarchy, as in a scattered landscape, in which the orientation is not given from the beginning, but must be sought. A condition that translates into a form of invitation to an attention that is not centered, peripheral, where the threshold between subject and environment becomes porous. In the rejection of every dichotomy – natural/artificial, figure/function, human/non-human – a consonance with post-humanist thought resonates. But Giancane does not intend to illustrate theories: rather, he shares their horizon. His works do not argue, do not explain, if anything they resist, existing in a present that is neither victim nor creator, but witness of a time that continues to resonate, despite everything.
Biography
Dario Giancane, born in 1982, lives and works in Arnesano, in the province of Lecce. An artist and professional in the creative sector, he has developed an eclectic career, operating in different fields of art, with a strong propensity for experimentation and innovation. His works, mainly sculptural and made with metals, are present in private and public collections.
In 2019, Giancane founded the Materdomini Museum, a research and study center dedicated to contemporary art, located in the heart of the Valle della Cupa, in Arnesano. This space stands out for its integrated approach, where artistic installations, both his own and those of other artists, blend with the surrounding landscape. The museum promotes a dialogue between art, nature and territory, encouraging research and exploration of matter in a context that enhances the historical and cultural identity of the place.
In February 2025 he published his first monograph “MATERDOMINI vision of a place in the contemporary”; He is currently a professor of New Materials Technologies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lecce.
Dario Giancane
Alone
presentation and critical text by Lara Gigante
June 7th – 27th 2025
Opening hours: Monday to Saturday 10.30am – 2.30pm / 4.30pm – 6.30pm
Sunday 10.30am – 2.30pm
GALLERIA ORIZZONTI ARTE CONTEMPORANEA Communication Manager
Piazzetta Cattedrale (old town) 72017 Ostuni (BR) Amalia Di Lanno
Tel. +39 0831 335 373 – Cell. +39 348 803 2506 www.amaliadilanno.com info@orizzontiarte.it – www.orizzontiarte.it
F: Orizzontiartecontemporanea