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From April 5th until May 3rd 2003, the exhibition “The herEThical anticorpus. Transfigured perpetual ikon” by Francesco Pirella, will be held at Studio B2, situated in Via San Luca 1/9A, in Genoa, Italy (from 4 o’clock p.m. to 7 o’ clock p.m. closed on Monday and Festivities), sponsored by Genoa Tangram S.p.a. Engineering for Health Society (www.tangramitaly.it). On this occasion (after five years since his last exhibition in Genoa), Pirella will propose the results of a long and demanding work, which has led him to develop an aestethic and cultural, elaborated and complex, mythology, linked to his concept of printability of the world. His work, which with this event has reached a complete maturation, is deeply rooted in ten-years of research on gutenbergian culture, on the concept of the book (which also resulted in his collection ‘ Museum of Printing’, being prepared in Genoa) and about the advent of digital era. The remnants of typographic technology become the raw materials he uses to build his story-objects, but also the imprinting ‘methodology’, typical of the pre-electric typography era, becomes the model of a true utopia of reproducibility of the world. Conceived by Pirella, the shroud technique, or the core of the event, lives and breathes in this context. By means of natural ‘instruments’, such as water, air, oil, cloth, he is skilful in reproducing the human body, but also animals and objects, with extraordinary results.

Via this technique, Francesco Pirella has ‘photographed’ his own body in full-length. The pirellian ‘autoshroud’ is going to be shown with other two superb images, belonging to famous Italian artists such as the musician Luciano Berio and the poet Edoardo Sanguineti, realized by means of this technique as well. These portraits come from a gallery of faces, filed by Pirella and including Alberto Abruzzese, Gillo Dorfles, Margherita Hack, Mario Luzi, Emanuele Luzzati, Mario Perniola, Fernanda Pivano, Vincenzo Tagliasco and many others. The setting-performance is completed with a set of ‘found-objects’, included sound-objects, all together connected to generate a cultural short-circuit amongst the evident elements of a degraded sacredness (the Holy Shroud), the typographical code (residue of a ‘concrete’ communication form, made obsolete by the advent of the Virtual) and the concept of ‘anticorpus’, as a protection against the menaces of unidirectional mind (as well as the shields used by no-gobal people during the G8 conference). The bioengineer Vincenzo Tagliasco and the journalist Giuliano Galletta will attend the inauguration of the exhibition, which will be held on Saturday, April 5th, 2003, at 5.30 p.m. at Studio B2. The catalogue (www.pirella.net) contains texts written by the artist, by the historicist of science Annamaria D’Ursi and one poetry by the poet Edoardo Sanguineti. Organization and public relations by Lucina Bovio. For further informations and any other detail, please contact B2 Gallery (++39-010-2462543) or Lucina Bovio’s mobile phone ++39-347-4438116