BIOGRAPHY

Andrea Lorenzo Agliaudi was born in Borgosesia (Vc) on May 9th,1979.
After his high school studies at the "D'Adda" High School in Varallo (Vc), during which he shows an extraordinary aptitude for learning ancient languages ​​and mathematics, in 1997 he enrolls in the degree course in Industrial Design at the Polytechnic of Milan.
At the end of 1998 he moves to Venice and enrolls in the Faculty of Oriental Languages, where he learned Hindi, Sanskrit and Chinese.
Although he did not complete his university studies, in the following years he continues to deepen his knowledge of the philosophy and art of the Far East. His interests range from logic to astrophysics, from the history of art and religion to ethnology, as well as to music and photography.
In this period, he also dedicates himself to painting, stone sculpture, wood carving and the composition of electronic music.
With the advent of Web 2.0 and the improvement of software for image processing, he begins to take an interest in digital art, experimenting with multiple techniques and starting to collaborate with the "DeviantArt" and "99designs" websites.
With the pseudonyms of Alsob and Muffaelucciole, he takes part to numerous contests, earning the praise of its clients and winning eighteen first prizes. In this way, he comes into contact with other artists from all over the world, comments on their works and receives their influences, animating a lively debate on digital art. 
His works also feature the themes which he holds dear, such as animalism and vegan culture, atheism, anarchy and environmentalism, expressing a great passion for nature and forests.
He commits suicide at Alpe Noveis (Bi), on the sunny afternoon of March 16th, 2017. 

Lorenzo Beccaro
Clarissa Sechi

ART CRITICISM

Andrea Lorenzo Agliaudi is an impressive example of an artist by nature. His art is not the product of studies, techniques learned at school or in academies, but of a strong sensibility and a natural expressive capacity. If you want to understand the eclecticism and the boundless productivity that characterize Andrea's art, you just have to browse this catalogue, or visit the exhibition dedicated to him.

The artist gives us a strong lesson of life with his own works: the art spectators often confuse the tool and the work. Andrea uses very different tools, but he always remains faithful to himself, and we recognize him in his works.

Let's start, for example, from his digital productions.

Sometimes the digital technique is treated with disregard, backing away, as if it were worth less than other form of art. This mistrust arises from the opinion that the digital medium is a took which everybody can use, and that therefore making digital art is like relying on means which are “able” to work in our place. You do not need a specialist to dispel such opinion, the works of Andrea are enough.

First of all, do we really know what we mean when we talk about digital art? We simply refer to all the artistic production made by using digital technological tools. This form of art starts with the '50s experiments directly performed on monitor by Ben Laposky (USA) and Manfred Frank (Germany), two mathematicians and software developers, but, strictly speaking, not artists, with artistic sensibilities characterised by a strongly graphic taste.

To say "digital art" is therefore in synthesis a bit like saying "sculptural art" or "pictorial art": in fact, it does not identify a precise technique, but a group of possible techniques to which the artist draws upon. As sculptural art includes marble sculpture, bronze casting, statues molded in plasticine and pictorial art refers to watercolors, oil, temperas and so on, even digital art is a very large basin of techniques, so much so that this large sector can be defined in dozens of sub-categories according to the digital technique used by the artist: Bio art, Bots art, Database art, Digital activism, Digital Animation, Digital community, Digital graphics, Digital performances, Game art, GIF art, Glitch art, Digital Interactive installation, Nano art, Net art, Robotics, Virtual art, etc.

Of course, digital technology forces the artist to take a less material approach to art: contact with matter ceases to be tangible and becomes virtual. This comment, which drives many to diminish the digital creation, had already been made with the advent of photography: the camera seemed a tool too independent and relatively simple to use for photography to be considered art.

Anyway, we must take a step back: the tool does not do the work, it is only the medium used by the artist to translate his thought. The work is made by the artist. It all becomes clearer if we consider the computer as a pencil: the pencil is also a tool, in fact the pencil leaves a mark on the paper, and the blank sheet is filled with images thanks to it, but nobody would dare to think that a drawing made by Correggio, Guercino, Leonardo or any other artist is less artistic for this reason. We must get accustomed to considering computer just like any other artistic technique experimented in the history of art so that we are not deceived by its apparently easily use.

I continue the comparison to highlight another aspect. Actually, nowadays there are numerous computer graphics software available to everybody, and without any need for specific training we can delight in creating images at home, on our PC or tablet, apparently without any difficulty. The typical phrase "I can do it myself" seems even more dead-on nowadays when referred to digital art. Similarly, we all, from three years of age, can easily draw a sign with a pencil on the paper. Each of us at home has at least one pencil, and we could easily enjoy using it to draw images without any specific training. Anyway, there is a gulf between this and art, it is all about the personal sensitivity of the true artist, who chooses the most appropriate tool to translate his thought into work.

Making art is not about the tool but lies in the depth, in the soul of the artist, and in his ability to use the technique to draw from it the most complete and effective result possible. For this reason, I can honestly affirm that it's true, I can use a pencil too, but I'm not an artist.

Whilst, Andrea is, and we speak of an all-round artist. Andrea has the ability to make the most of the techniques that in the course of his life he has learned to use, as a self-taught and experimenter, to create works that fully express their creative power.

The computer graphic is but the last landing of his research: drawing, sculpture, photography, everything has been used by Andrea to create art. He has been able to recognize in every tool its specific expressive quality and to use it to communicate his thought from time to time.

Andrea has fully understood that digital art has a critical feature: it can be used to shape the elements, to deform them, to distort them, to make them become liquids, to make them shaky. On this concept of transformation rest a large part of his digital works: different definitions and textures coexist in them, immerged in an often alienating atmosphere. On liquid, smoky, almost brushed surfaces, totemic, almost archaic, definite, precise stencil-like figures appear. Three-dimensionality is another recurring feature in his digital drawings: the overlapping of different textures creates a succession of planes that leads the viewer deep, invites him to enter into an alien space, to share a kind of trance of the senses and perception. The distortion of space is accompanied by often stylized human figures that represent Andrea as a man, but which also allow identification with any men, with us, with you. After all, art has always allowed us to create "something else" compared to that already created by nature. Art is not immediately born as a description, but rather as a representation of the invisible or not tangible, of universes linked to sacredness and myth.

In this context, Andrea's art uses a contemporary tool to fit into a thousand-year history of creation: his computer graphics are contemporary as rock engravings were contemporary for prehistoric peoples.

It is no coincidence that Andrea’s works often refer to primitive images, to other cultures. In fact, he strongly feels the spirit of universal research, which has led him to know distant cultures and become interested in the language systems, either verbal or visual, provided that they are different from ours.

Oriental ideograms, feminine figures made with the elegance of the Japanese press so beloved between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which had such a stylistic impact to open new paths to the European art of that period, recur in his drawings.

Andrea squeezes the juice of every technique.

His drawings and his paintings highlight a remarkable graphic ability, and, most of all, a curios and meticulous mind: they almost remind certain medical charts for the precision of the marks, they are merciless in the accumulation of details, signs, lines. We can almost imagine his hand relentlessly translating on paper the equally quick thoughts that constantly appear in his mind.

He also recognizes in sculpture the privileged technique by which he can deepen his interest in primitive forms. The sculpture has an intrinsic expressiveness that derives from the original material, but also from the physical commitment that requires the artist to be eradicated from the initial material. The stones and woods of Andrea's sculptures are powerful, hard-worked, with commitment, in depth. They recall archaeological finds because they are often rough-hewn; the images are intentionally mentioned, but in this all-human capacity to start from a few lines and volumes to reconstruct finished images lays the universal force of art: we do not need much to recognize a face, we just need a formal hint, a sketched volume, because we have a common cultural background to which both the artist and the visitor draw, and which inevitably brings them closer.

The ability of visual synthesis mentioned above soon leads Andrea to work on logos. An effective logo must be easily recognizable and memorable, impactful, original and beautiful. The more the final result is simple and immediate, the more the logo works, the more the intellectual work that led to this result has been challenging. The simplicity of the final result is inversely proportional to the simplicity of the ideation. Making a logo also requires a capacity for empathy with the customer, because a logo must reflect the characteristics of the product, rather than those of the artist. Andrea succeeds in all this, with an impressive sensitivity and elegance.

It is really remarkable how Andrea managed to achieve such a degree of mastery without having attended any Academy or school of arts Anyway, at the end of the day, it is enough to know him a little even through the biography or memories of friends, to understand that we are facing an exorbitant personality, an uncontrollable devourer of stimuli, a hypersensitive and readily emotional mind - in the positive sense of the term. His interests are encyclopaedic, his passion is vast and his production appeared, on the occasion of this retrospective, surprisingly wide and varied.

However, his hand and his thought are always recognizable in all this heterogeneity of solutions and works. Most of his production is strongly characterized by a disenchanted irony, although it is not a heavy burden, rather an invitation to be light, to see the inconsistencies of the reality that surrounds us as one of the funny aspects of life. This irony is more evident in digital works, but underlies the same concept of making art, which is partly conceived as a game. We often make the mistake of associating play and superficiality: on the contrary, play is a fundamental moment of human growth and it must be present in all phases of life, not just in childhood, for people to realize themselves. Playing we are allowed to be other than ourselves, to experiment, to look in a certain sense our life from the outside, to imagine. Only through the ability to play people can open their mind to new perspectives, can be enriched by stimuli that in everyday life would not touch them. The anthropologists are well aware of this, Andrea is well aware of this, not only because he has certainly deepened his anthropological interests, among his various ones, but probably because he feels it instinctively.

I talked about Andrea in the present because when we talk about art, true art, it makes no sense to use past or future: it hits us now, excites us now, surprise us now, because it does not matter if it was made today, one hundred years ago or one thousand years ago, its emotional effect will always be contemporary.

Beatrice Resmini

THE ANDREA AGLIAUDI FOUNDATION

The Andrea Agliaudi Foundation was established in Postua (VC) on June 14th, 2022 on the initiative of Andrea’s parents, his family and closest friends. 

The Foundation, which is a non-profit, aims to promote and enhance the intellectual and artistic production of Andrea Agliaudi, who died prematurely in Noveis (Bi) on 16 March 2017, through recreational activities of cultural and social interest, including authentication, archiving and catalogues' drafting of his works.

Main objective that the Foundation pursues is the organization of museum activities and exhibitions, events, seminars, and conferences, including the publication of related documents, and, more broadly, all those initiatives suitable for promoting a synergy with the national and international cultural system, and the public.

In the coming years, even in collaboration with other associations, foundations, art historians and artists, the ambitious goal is to be able to obtain funding to provide training courses, prizes and scholarships in memory of Andrea Agliaudi.

The Board of Directors is formed by Lorenzo Beccaro (President), Alessandro D'Alfonso (Vice President), Davide Ceretti (Treasurer) and Clarissa Sechi (Secretary).

The Andrea Agliaudi Foundation (Tax Id 91021320022), registered in Vercelli with deed no. 3696 on 24/06/2022 and transcribed in Biella on 30/06/2022 with registration no. 5859 - d’Ord. AI no. 4526 Part.