biography
Born in La Spezia in 1975, Carlo Zanni is an Italian conceptual artist with a distinctive approach engaging in parallel practices of painting and web-based art, each exploring the same subject matter from different perspectives. A pioneer in the use of third-party Internet data, since 1999 his practice has explored the public space of the web creating time-based ephemeral works that combine a pronounced social consciousness with a primary focus on privacy, identity, and the self. As a painter, he focuses his attention on a new kind of “shared political landscape” that emerged with the Internet and that keeps transforming all human activities and relationships.
Zanni has been the recipient of a Rhizome.org commission and he has shown in galleries and museums worldwide including: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Marsèlleria, Milan; Tent, Rotterdam; MAXXI, Rome; MoMA PS1, New York; Borusan Center, Istanbul; PERFORMA 09, NY and ICA, London. Carlo Zanni is the author of the book “Art in the Age of the Cloud”, and recently he has been invited to introduce his practice at the 10th edition of “Talking Galleries” in Barcelona. His work appears in more than 50 books and catalogs, as well as in hundreds of articles and interviews online.
Check-Out Paintings
Zanni’s ongoing series, Check-Out Paintings, are abstract works that navigate the psychological limbo of purchasing, capturing the fleeting yet compulsive emotions tied to eCommerce as a platform for engagement with the world. They are contemplative explorations of anxiety, desire, and our awareness of the world as we book, like, swipe, ship, zoom, or return. These canvases establish a dialogue involving digital culture and traditional artistic approaches, building on the legacy of On Kawara’s temporal explorations and Agnes Martin’s minimalist sensibilities. Using a muted palette and integrating visual elements like emojis and Japanese emoticons as clickbaits, these paintings compel the viewer to engage more intimately, ultimately revealing unexpected content.
DAN
This body of works comprises laser-engraved MDF boxes featuring distorted and misspelled Amazon Prime logos. These distortions were created using an early, imperfect version of DALL-E, the text-to-image AI software now integrated into ChatGPT. DAN stands for “Do Anything Now,” referencing a command line that once allowed users to hack ChatGPT, bypassing its built-in ethical and moral safeguards. These minimalist boxes invite viewers to engage in a symbolic process of unboxing and self-reflection. As viewers’ eyes adjust to the low light, hidden forms gradually begin to emerge.
My Shameful Sweet Spot Between Distress and Hilarity
A live internet-evolving digital piece that explores the fragile interplay of beauty, humor, and the absurdity of our lives. By using a bot that queries a fashion website with current news from Al Jazeera, the work transforms consumer culture into a dynamic meditation on human longings and vulnerabilities. This echoes Slavoj Žižek’s concept of “Unknown Knowns”—those beliefs, values, and ideologies that lie beneath our awareness and significantly shape the way we perceive the world and act within it.
Save me for later
“Save me for later” (2022) is a bot browsing Amazon.com, continuously adding products to the cart that is visible in the right sidebar. When the cart reaches its limit, it automatically moves products to the “saved for later list”, making room for freshly added new ones. This repetitive and almost hypnotic web performance, with apparently no beginning and no end, is both a pursuit of happiness, as society has taught us, and a place of escapism and daydreaming. “Save me for later” is consciously slow and cryptic, and as it is playing out in real-time, on the real Amazon website, the items that appear reflect our present time just as the subtle writings on the abstract “Check Out paintings” (2022 – ongoing) take us back to the world we are living in.
