METROPOLITAN EMBEDDED SYSTEMS
It’s no surprise that from the third millennium, considered the brain century, raises an artist like Pietro Dente. This is in fact the century that explains the functioning of the brain intended as a device operating thanks to processes of integration, personification and incorporation, allowing us to acknowledge and live the reality in which we are plunged. Nowadays electrodes attached to the brain are capable to measure the electric activity of approximately 100.000 neurons. Electroencephalogram records their fluctuant “waves” of different width. Pietro Dente materializes his cities as if they were embedded systems made of an underlying hardware and a software on the surface. Within his projecting, he proceeds from the inside and then on towards the outside, as if he was creating the city “genome” one cell after the other, until he crystallizes his elaborating system, the microprocessor, the first imprint. But being not satisfied with the result, yet, with generous spirit, the artist invites us to visit his cities from the sky, offering a whole spectrum and then inside these universes to sightseeing each segment, made of single atoms in frenetic communication one another so to compose a dialogue, “the air” of the city … which is often a “tough air”. The artist representation is not enough anymore. That has been done already, dejà vu. Pietro Dente the artist calls us, invites us to play with him the game of the city, introducing us in its streets, breathing tough air of metropolis, feel the inebriation and emotion of climbing a skyscraper o simply driving towards the Sunset Boulevard or Via Monte Napoleone. Yes, Pietro Dente is a young Venetian complete and mature artist. He is original as for his three-dimensional research and study on modern materials, being them the result of the chemical contemporary investigations, too. Dente is able to combine with traditional craftsmanship when he works on the lower canvas with is brush, marking the canvas itself with precise and skilful dots and lines forming the hardware. At the same time, the artist is capable of expressing himself like a careful, up to date observer guiding us to taste games of shadows and lights reflected from the second art work support through the learned use of modern materials applied to the canvas; to live his cities like in a simulation, inside “elaboration systems and CPUs’” wisely engineered to let us live the “as if” experience: as if we were really there, in the city, direct personified main characters, experiencing his incorporated metropolitan systems. Boston, New York, Toronto, Milan, Venice, and many more. This is the magic world inside which Pietro Dente’s paint leads us.