EDITION OF 10 UNIQUE PIECES
2024
PROCESS
The edition Untitled (Italian truck brands) is a reference to the boxing imagery of the eighties, and consists of a printed still image extracted from a boxing fight video, with a hand-written text.
The boxing match Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Thomas Hearns took place on the 16th of September 1981 at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, for the undisputed welterweight championship. Leonard and Hearns were two of the “Fabulous Four”, a group of boxers from the 1980s consisting of Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Durán, Thomas Hearns, and Marvin Hagler. The four boxers produced some of the greatest boxing matches of all time in their weight class.
Francesco Gioacchini, instead of referring to the match itself, highlights a secondary element, the advertisement “IVECO” visible on the corner of the ring, and displayed as overlay ads on the screen. By this process, the Italian transport vehicle company, which sponsored the boxing match, becomes the third protagonist of the scene.
While the central printed image is repeated in the same way in all ten prints, the hand-written text adds an element of unicity to each single work of the edition, by creating unavoidable differences between each piece.
The edition is part of an ongoing series of works addressing the idea of something that could be called “Italianness”. The artist evokes the aesthetic and imagery of specific elements of the Italy he grew up in by focusing on visual aspects of Italian culture such as signs, advertisements, and other objects of common use dating back to the last decades of the XX century.
Each print is signed, numbered and dated by the artist on the reverse.