Tag Archives: Manifeste Azioni
Dec
Gio Montez presents the performative collective Barbari Sognanti, led by Vitaldo Conte. Positioned between ritual, performance, and documentation, the action transformed a dense, ecstatic performative environment into a field of visual and conceptual experimentation.
Through a dynamic scenic direction and an experimental audiovisual practice—centered on the inhabitable installation known as “the cage”—Montez explored the threshold between self and other, documentation and creation. Video and photography became imaginal devices, deforming reality to generate poetic content. The resulting works—a video and six unique photographs—render the performative bodies as an immaterial presence, a “cloud of smoke enclosed in a cage,” existing only through its relational context.
Jul
Gio Montez replaces the idea of the finished artwork with a fluid action, creating a system of exchange, where form remains negotiable and value is determined in real time. The canvas becomes a mutable field, fragmented, pre-sold, and completed only through a pact between artist and collector. In this process, painting is no longer a static object but a liquid instrument—one that absorbs urgency, participation, and risk—transforming survival into method and transaction into gesture.
Dec
Evacuazione emerges from an urban emergency, transforming accumulation, neglect, and abandonment into an act of removal and regeneration. The action displaces waste from the streets into the symbolic economy of art, where discarded materials are reconfigured as provisional objects rather than definitive works. Value is shifted away from the artifact toward the gesture itself: the physical act of clearing space, restoring attention, and reactivating collective responsibility. In Evacuazione, art functions as a temporary tool, an operative process that privileges care over possession and demonstrates how minimal, shared actions can recalibrate the relationship between bodies, materials, and public space.
Nov
Between 2010 and 2015, in Rome, Gio Montez transformed a fire-damaged industrial ruin into Atelier Montez, conceiving restoration not as renovation but as a methodological and artistic act. By “making solid again” what had been destroyed, Montez recognized the architecture itself as a work of art—both container and content—capable of carrying aesthetic, historical, and social meaning forward in time.
Restoration stands as a gesture of material and symbolic regeneration, in which urban recovery becomes a position on the present: a reflection on authority, continuity, and cultural responsibility within a fragile political landscape. The rebuilt space functions as a living monument of contemporaneity, devoted to artistic production, transmission, and collective memory.
Mar
Gio Montez’s action witnesses a symbolic passage in Cuban history, coinciding with the lifting of the long-standing embargo that had imposed political, economic, and cultural isolation for more than six decades. Conceived as a conceptual and material gesture, the action reflects on Cuba’s transition from enforced stasis toward an uncertain engagement with the global system. At its core is Black Cloud, a ready-made installation in which Montez captured carbon dioxide emitted by a 1930s automobile still circulating in Havana, sealing it within a glass jar and transporting it to Europe as an archaeological relic of a suspended era. Through this and related works from the Incubation cycle, Montez adopts a neo-Dadaist approach that positions art as a tool of preservation and critical memory, capable of transforming ephemeral traces of history into reflective instruments for understanding a society in transition.
Aug
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.
Apr
Gio Montez sculpted a monumental candle from 60 kilograms of beeswax for the biennial of light culture, allowing fire and hand to shape it together. The work emphasized process over product: visitors witnessed the candle’s gradual transformation while the artist remained on site, carving as it slowly burned.
Revisited in later editions of the biennial, the piece remains unfinished, a meditation on time, materiality, and the interplay between human action and elemental forces, highlighting Montez’s focus on art as an evolving, lived experience.
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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