Giovanni Motta

di Ivan Quaroni e Linda Tommasi

Giovanni Motta is one of the Italian crypto artists who best embodies the epochal transition from physical art to the immaterial world of NFT. Born in Verona in 1971, he came to art after a past as an advertiser. Drawing, however, has been a passion since childhood. Since 2000 he began to exhibit in galleries and public spaces his own works, drawings, paintings, and 3D sculptures that reveal his passion for manga, anime, and American cartoons. At the center of his work is "Jonny Boy," a character who embodies the innocence of childhood but which is also a metaphor for the inner child who inhabits the consciousness of every man. His almost hyper-realistic painting, but contaminated by pop culture, has a message as simple as powerful: the recovery of childhood creativity as vital energy that resides in the memory of individuals and that can be rediscovered through a work of psychological and spiritual excavation. All of his works stem from his daily practice of regressive meditation, a technique that allows him to bring vivid memories of the past to the surface from the buried depths of the unconscious, which he then translates into images that capture the sense of wonder and excitement of childhood experiences. This feeling of excitement is encoded in the form of the video game metaphor. Jonny's fluctuations, in fact, recall the condition of the player immersed in the flow of the game in a dimension of synaesthetic dilation that alters the perception of time. Jonny is, therefore, the symbol of all the qualities of the child, not yet corrupted by the cynicism of adult life

Mystic Lollipop

This work was born from a collaboration between Motta and Veneziano. Motta brings into the universe of Jonny Boy the baby Hitler of Veneziano, taking the painting "The Madonna of the Third Reich" of 2009 that has already made much discussion. Jonny, in the arms of a Raphaelesque Madonna, the Madonna Aldobrandini (or Madonna Garvagh), gives the little Hitler a Chupa Chups. The gesture must be read without prejudice as a call to the innocence and emotionality of childhood. The gaze of the Madonna, who does not see in little Hitler, a bloody dictator but only a child, is the gaze of a mother, the symbol of Christian forgiveness.

Afternoon Garage

Chi non ha mai sognato di indossare uno zaino-razzo e volare fino alla luna, e oltre? Proprio così, Giovanni Motta mette in luce l’irrefrenabile desiderio di viaggio e scoperta di Jonny Boy, un bambino coraggioso ma incerto che vive nell’anima di ognuno di noi, un bambino che vuole correre con tutte le sue forze per raggiungere la stella più lontana là fuori.