Gio Montez receives the Premio Soriano Città for his powerful contribution to public art in Soriano nel Cimino. With the sculpture “Sublimazione,” a contemporary pedestal inspired by Michelangelo’s David, Montez invites citizens to reclaim the symbolic role of the hero, offering a living monument that challenges the monstrous and celebrates human dignity.
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.
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.