Davide_Fontana / Works

A place where relics of the digital age come to strand. A collection of internet-found objects. They are illusions, ghosts of an original, their purpose is unspecified, their history forgotten.

ISLAND OF LOST AND FOUND was selected for the Premio Nazionale Delle Arti 2024: a selection of the best works by students among every art school in Italy.
Displayed in Fondazione Brodbeck, Catania (18.10 - 15.12.2024)

An island that is simultaneously concrete and intangible, real but also a poorly concealed illusion. Its inhabitants are objects, places, people that have been scanned through the technique of photogrammetry, thus entering a completely diffeerent dimension, one to which they don’t belong. They are now relics, digital ghosts, infinitely duplicable and alterable copies of an original, stripped of their history and the memories associated with them, shipwrecked on an island that doesn't exist as they drifted across the web.

Just like Louise Nevelson and Joseph Cornell are considered artist-collectors for their work in the 50s and 60s, this island is made up of found objects, decontextualized and repurposed, arranged inside a box or a frame. If the objects in Cornell’s boxes are found in thrift stores or by the side of the street, the ones on this island are stumbled upon browsing the internet, in the “sort-by-newest” tab or among the last pages of sites like Sketchfab.com.
There's a familiar aspect to them, their jagged look gives a sense of warmth like the grain of 35mm or the crackling of a vinyl.