“I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was
happening in America, the brutality of the world.
What kind of a man am I, sitting at home, reading
magazines, going into a frustrated fury about
everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a
red to a blue”.Philip Guston, ca1968
Banquet Gallery is pleased to present DAN, Carlo Zanni’s first exhibition at the gallery. The show features Zanni’s latest wor ks—paintings, sculptures, and an Internet performance—that explore the intersections of consumerism, anxiety, emojis, and identity against the backdrop of a forever war scenario.
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 com pel the viewer to engage more intimately, ultimately revealing unexpected content.
In the lower gallery, in a dimly lit environment, the title work DAN is exhibited for the first time. It 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 com mand 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.
Completing the exhibition is the Internet performance, My Shameful Sweet Spot Between Distress and Hilarity, a live, evolving digital piece that explores the fragile interplay of beauty, humor, and the absurdity of our lives. By using a bot that queries a fa shion 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.
Zanni’s works in DAN continue his conceptual practice by seamlessly blending technology, social commentary, and tradi tional techniques into a liminal state that evokes an unstable, shifting sense of being.
Carlo Zanni (La Spezia, 1975) is an Italian conceptual artist with a distinctive approach engaging in parallel practices of pain ting 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 ke eps 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”, that will be reprinted by Magütt Publishing, 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. His first monograph will be published by Printer Fault Press in 2025.