Category Archives: Manifeste Azioni
Dec
Gio Montez transforms Piazza del Popolo into a living tableau, gathering the artists of Rome in an unannounced, self-generating happening. What emerges is The School of Rome, a photographic re-writing of Raphael’s School of Athens, composed not through staging but through presence, relation, and revelation.
May
When a Sculpture Becomes a Gesture. There are moments in contemporary art when the boundary between object and action becomes so thin it suddenly dissolves. Gio Montez’s Azione n. 6 – Sublimazione is one of those moments—an event that is less a performance than an eruption of meaning in a precise place and time.
It begins with a block of local peperino stone, intended to become a sculpture. Instead of carving a figure, Montez removes the figure itself, leaving only a pedestal inspired by Michelangelo’s David. And then, in a gesture both vulnerable and defiant, the artist steps onto that pedestal—nude, exposed to the Tuscia landscape and to the centuries of history embedded in it.
Facing the valley of Bomarzo, Montez reenacts the tension of a mythic hero confronting his monsters. The gesture sparked debate, fascination, and, eventually, recognition: what some saw as provocation was soon understood as a clear act of sublimation—the transformation of instinct into symbol, flesh into thought, scandal into art.
In that instant, the pedestal becomes a stage, the body becomes language, and the entire landscape becomes the artwork’s frame. Montez’s “Sublimazione” is not just a performance; it is a meditation on courage, vulnerability, and the power of turning human impulse into creative revelation.
Mar
During the years of the so-called “Arab Springs,” the artist crossed the semi-desert regions of Morocco several times, searching for a visual form capable of reconciling Christian tradition and Arab culture, as well as Italian and Moroccan building practices. The palms—symbols of water and sacredness in the local context—thus take on the appearance of modern, monetizable buildings, becoming metaphors for the cultural and urban tensions affecting the country.
Jan
Organic and symbolic materials — ink, blood, lamb meat, flour, wine, water — transforming painting into a physical and sacred act, a process through which matter settles and immediately becomes language. The pictorial gesture becomes a trace, an imprint, an anthropometry: a constellation of signs in which matter does not merely illustrate, but speaks, manifests itself, transforms.
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