Gianni Bertini

The work

Ruins of Thebes
2004-05
190 x 120 cm
Mec-Art

The style of the work Ruins of Thebes is directly inspired by comic book illustrations. Bertini was one of the pioneers of a mechanical art technique, abbreviated to Mec-art, which consisted of transferring photographic images onto a canvas treated with a photosensitive emulsion. While Andy Warhol had used adapted photographic transfers in many of his silkscreen prints, the European artists associated with Mec-art restructured the original images to create a new, synthetic one.
The work on display is clearly the result of a combination of seven or eight images that evoke the exterior of airplanes and unidentifiable parts of machinery. The composition is organized by a series of horizontal planes that are denser and darker at the bottom and lighter at the top. The sky blue color unifies the top and bottom edges.

Thebes was the name of two cities in ancient times, one Egyptian and the other Greek. The Greek city was also the place where much of Greek mythology took place. Throughout his life, Bertini used names of characters from classical myths in various works.

The aritst

Pisa, Italy, 1922 – Caen, France, 2010

Throughout the 1960s, he produced works in Paris that were remarkably striking and aggressive, on themes such as consumerism, fashion, sex, space conquest, and other topics of contemporary society, consisting of photographic collages with increasingly smaller pictorial interventions.