Alessandro Giannì
Period - Ultra-Contemporary
Context - Neo-classical figuration within post-Internet culture
Cultural Signal - Return to technical mastery
Medium - Oil painting and digital experimentation
Language - Monumental figuration between antiquity and contemporary vulnerability
Why Now - Renewed appetite for permanence and craft
Alessandro Giannì in his studio, Rome.
Photo: Carlo Romano. Courtesy of Quadriennale di Roma.
Alessandro Giannì works at the intersection of painting and digital culture. His practice begins with fragments such as images collected from the internet, aesthetic residues circulating endlessly online. Rather than reproducing them, he recontextualises them, granting these fragments a new existence through painting and technological experimentation.
His work operates within a post-Internet condition, where authorship is no longer singular but negotiated. In 2019, he developed Vasari, an artificial intelligence designed to emulate aspects of his creative and conceptual process. The gesture is not a replacement for the artist, but an extension of him. Hence, AI becomes a collaborator, not a substitute, but a tool that assists in composing sketches while maintaining human authorship at the core.
Alessandro Giannì, Untitled, 2021.
Oil on canvas, 230 × 250 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Giannì’s practice spans traditional and technological mediums: painting, drawing and sculpture coexist with VR, video, animation and 3D printing. This hybridity is not stylistic excess but structural logic. Each medium becomes a different way of investigating the relationship between digital universes and the introspective world of human beings.
What distinguishes his work is the tension between material and immaterial. The tactile discipline of painting meets the fluid instability of online imagery. In a cultural moment saturated by infinite digital reproduction, Giannì reintroduces slowness and physical presence without rejecting technological reality.
Alessandro Giannì, L’ora in cui, 2025.
Oil on canvas, 200 × 250 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Why now? Because Giannì’s practice reflects a broader cultural shift: the convergence of analogue craft and algorithmic systems. His work does not choose between tradition and innovation. It insists that contemporary art must hold both.
In Giannì’s universe, painting is not nostalgic, it is adaptive. And technology is not disembodied, it is intimate.
Biographical information sourced from the artist’s official website.