Project

SELEZIONE NATURALE (Natural selection) it’s my first anthology book.
Published by Zooo print and press in 2019.
Enveloped in a double face poster, in the 150 pages of the book there’s a selection of the best works of the last 10 years: murals, paintings, watercolours, drawings, etchings, beasts and adventures.
In May the book was premiered in Bologna with an exhibition hosted at Squadro stamperia, where they realized a series of 3 screen-prints for the occasion.
Selezione naturale is now sold out!

Hitnes’s The Image Hunter project culminated with an exhibition at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary arts at the College of Charleston in the fall of 2018.
The realization of the whole exhibition took me 6 months during a residency in Charleston South Carolina, between 2017 and 2018.
I was able to retrace the steps of my voyage done in 2015 and focus on John James Audubon’s connections with the wild and the birds, creating my own connections and allowing this research to form my creative practice.
The exhibition consists of 15 shadow-boxes, 53 etchings and drawings, 2 hand-made books 5 artist sketch books, objects and ephemera collected along the 2015 journey.

After Charleston the Exhibition travelled to other locations:
Lake Charles Historic City Hall Arts & Cultural Center, Lake Charles, LA. February 22 – April 27, 2019
Provo City Library at Academy Square, Provo City, UT. October 4 – November 27, 2019
High Desert Museum, Bend, OR. October 17, 2020 – February 21, 2021
Costal Discovery Museum, Hilton heads, SC. April – June 2022

This part of the exhibition focus on the deep aesthetic bound between observing and painting.
The subjects of the 15 shadow-boxes are the birds painted in the murals of the journey in 2015 and the locations and the emotions inspired by the ”hunt” of this birds.
In every piece the techniques used by the artist are many but mainly watercolours and acrylics.
The layers of paper are the core of the boxes, first painted and than patiently cut, the different type of sheets are kept together and layered by gator-foam and restauration glue.
The distance between the layers enhance the perception of the painting, and drives the eyes of the viewer in some kind of set design created to observe the “soul” of the birds.
Pieces of natural materials taken during the voyage were cleaned and placed in each box showing the real connection between the location and the observation of the birds, transforming this pieces in to some kind of diorama of my adventures.
Each wooden box has been hand painted whit acrylic and sealed behind poly.

“FRAGMENTS OF THE BIRDS OF AMERICA”

This part of the Image Hunter exhibition is centred on the book The Birds of America. This series of etched birds are my own Birds of America.
The plates depict part of the personal record of the specimens observed during the voyage in 2015, each subject has been renamed with some story or fact related to its observation. Etched on irregular fragments of copper, the plates are no bigger than 2.5×2.5 in, the whole print work is done with the same technique as the printer Robert Havell reproduced Audubon’s watercolour for his magnificent book in 1827: etching and aquatint, in my work only the colouring is missing.
I etched and printed all the 53 plates in my studio in Rome and collected everything in a book: “Fragments of the Birds of America”. Hand bound into an edition of 9\9 precious and unique exemplars, each book has been composed with a different marbled paper and different colours for the leather binding of the spine.
The book is embedded in a larger cloth box with screen printed and relief decorations, this choice of format enhances the perception of miniature creating a playful contrast with the opulent size of the double elephant folio of Audubon’s The Birds of America.

In the winter of 2017 I travelled to the Amazon forest in Colombia.
I left with other tree artists Ericailcane, Bastardilla and DEM.
We stayed as guests of the Guacamaio for a month, our first idea was to gather ideas and materials for a book (eventually this book would came out in 2019) but we got back with much more, or less if you will. During our time in the Forest many events took place, but we could only scratch a really little part of the many surfaces of this green ocean of wonders and terrors.

Hasta ahi les puedo decir

Le chasseur et le graveur, a personal exhibition curated by Eric Surmont (Winterlong galerie), at Le Pilorì in Niort (FR) held in autumn 2016. There I exhibited only my calco-graphic works, a vast variety of my etchings and some xylography, everything etched and printed in my studio.
For the finissage of the exhibition I held a linocut workshop for two days, together with Ericailcane and Bastardilla.

La Collezione Sommersa (2016)
“La Collezione Sommersa”, The Submerged Collection is a site specific exhibition for the Etruscan Museum of Trevignano Romano. This little city is placed on the shores of lake Bracciano, the pieces of the exhibition where elegedly found on the bottom of the lake.
The exhibition was curated by Elisa Cella, the director of the museum and Hitnes. The 20 pieces, of different sizes and shapes where placed in to the display cases with other archaeological finds in order to create a controlled illusion for the viewers. Also the title where given with an archaeological order. The city of Trevignano Romano sponsored a mural that was realized in the occasion of the exhibition.

Quotidianità dei segni rupestri (2015)

Museum Circuit of Lazio National Ethnographic and Prehistoric Museum “Luigi Pigorini”
Quotidianità dei Segni Rupestri represents the second chapter of the Declinazioni di Comunità series, created and curated by Emanuele Rinaldo Meschini as part of the Torno subito project. Promoted by the region of Lazio, Declinazioni di Comunità is a contemporary art program divided into three exhibitions aimed at analyzing the relationship between artists and community in relation to the Pigorini Museum’s ethnographic and prehistoric collections. The exhibition Quotidianità dei Segni Rupestri, on show from May 7 to May 30 2015, is curated by Emanuele Rinaldo Meschini and Alessandra Serges. The work of two artists, Hitnes (Rome, 1982) and Il Baro (Paolo Baraldi, Bergamo,1977), creates a dialogue between street art and the prehistoric and protohistoric rock art found in two importan tinternational sites – Tadrart Acacus in Libya (VII-I millennium BC) and the Valle Camonica in Italy (Brescia, V-Imillennium BC). In particular, this dialogue comes from the need to grapple with issues surrounding the current concept of street art as it moves into galleries and becomes increasingly self-referential, yet tries to re-establish contact with primitive forms of public communication. Both Tadrart Acacus and Valle Camonica, with their unique representations, cast a light on a primitive concept of public communication. By bringing together narrative and visual vocabulary, this “pre-communication” fused different layers of communication into the first “identity” narrative.
The artistic output Hitnes created for the Pigorini Museum dialogues with the rock paintings of Tadrart Acacus, primarily the reproductions created during Fabrizio Mori’s missions. The Mori Collections, a body of rock art reproductions created between 1958 and 1969 by Piero Guccione and Lorenzo Tornabuoni, is currently conserved in the museum. These collections were the inspiration for the Roman artist’s work, who used the concept of reproduction as a starting point in creating a series of painted rocks inspired by Saharan motifs. The technique developed by Guccione, which he himself defined as “false rock,” entailed recreating rock backgrounds on canvas, which Hitnes, in this instance, has contorted by using real stones and creating “false artifacts” that consist of dreamlike zoomorphic figures.