Valentino Vannini
Overview
“My work aims to explore, the ways in which we navigate queer desire.” - Valentino Vannini
Cruising as a queer act of defiance and resilience against social norms defines the subject of Valentino Vannini’s practice. His installations, sculptures, prints and drawings explore this liminal territory, in which the performative act of searching for sex - the anticipation, loneliness, anonymity, and desire - is translated into a physical form. Through indirectly gesturing towards the body, Vannini’s work aims to understand how we navigate this elusive environment. Harvesting from and drawing on the urban landscape, his antinomic material choices challenge biases, binaries, and other social-political constructs.
His works ‘ANON - DTF’, a series of monolithic sculptures, both reference and subvert brutalism and classical sculpture through their disregard for traditional muscular architectural elements. The concrete columnar stability of these monoliths is compromised by their embarrassingly sagging ascent to the ceiling. Petroleum jelly is smeared along their shafts and caps their peaks, acting as material antithesis but also humorously exposing age-old sodomitic insults about allegedly unnatural sexual practices. Glass casts of lube sachets act as anthropological markers and behavioural relics, while lube oozes profusely from the sides of the monoliths, leaking onto the floor in a playfully frictionless and unapologetic celebration of abandonment, vulnerability and pride.
Biography
Valentino Vannini lives and works in London. He completed a BA in Art, Drama and Music Studies at the University of Bologna, Italy (2014), followed by taking courses at the Royal Academy of Arts (2019) and the Royal Drawing School (2021-2022), before completed an MA in Fine Art at City & Guilds (2023). In 2019, he was awarded a residency at Atelier Meridian in Portland, USA, and is currently artist in residence at Standpoint Gallery, London until January 2024. His work has been featured in group shows at galleries including: Somers Gallery, London (2023), Peckham Platform, London (2016) and Candid Art Trust, Angel (2015).
Exhibitions
Works
