The Lonely Concert - Press'Award - 4th Biennale Di Genova 2021

Alessio Belloni's works are always interesting and very topical. In particular, this THE LONELY CONCERT describes the climate that has been created for a year and a half with the Covid 19 pandemic, when people recorded, and then shared on social networks or sang on the balconies. It is impossible to tolerate silence, but it is forbidden to meet, and so everyone - musicians and not - have tried to express themselves at a distance, each from their own home (from their own room).
I am reminded of Taylor Hawkins - Foo Fighters drummer - playing in the living room, surrounded by carpets. However, Belloni's work transmits a different vibration, full of melancholy that I find in Edward Hopper's APARTMENTS, HOUSES series. The dark mass of Belloni's building reminds me, above all, of NIGHT WINDOWS, a painting in which the American painter cancels his well-known brightness in favor of a nocturnal scene, almost a triptych, which gives three different framed views of the same room. Likewise, Alessio Belloni's work portrays three people, three moments, which however take place in unison in a single concert. Another artistic reference could be Mark Rothko's BLACK ON MAROON, in which the two lighter vertical stripes resemble a darkened opening and metaphorically represent the soul. We can therefore think of the work in a metaphysical sense, as the opening or closing of our ego towards our neighbor.
To give solidity to THE LONELY CONCERT, however, it is not only the evening quality of non-color, but also the structure of a traditional Victorian architecture.
The choice to frame the three characters inside as many windows interspersed with empty (silent) spaces makes the vision itself similar to a score, as well as being strongly cinematic. The image can be read musically, like a succession of notes, and we can even hypothesize the existence of a sequence of buildings with similar scenes.
Even through a mute image, one senses the power of music to defeat pain and loneliness, exactly - and with the same graphic-visual choice - as it happened in Gus Van Sant's movie LAST DAYS, in which, at a certain point , the protagonist unleashes himself arpeggiating alone on the guitar in a study room.
As the English writer John Irving put it: “Keep passing the open windows”: at times it can be traumatic - even deadly - but at other times it is an immersive discovery.

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