User:Wikiblissett/Piermario Ciani

Piermario Ciani (Bertiolo, June 19, 1951 - Udine, July 3, 2006) was an Italian artist, photographer and graphic designer also known for his activities in the fields of publishing, mail art, event creation and counterculture. Throughout his life he also used the alter-egos Trux, Luther Blissett and Stickerman.

The 80's, between photography and xerography
Piermario Ciani was born in Bertiolo, in the province of Udine, on 19 June 1951. After a pictorial debut in the mid-seventies with results close to the Op Art, starting from 1979 he animates the Free Documentation Center in Udine, a reality that sees among also guests Fernanda Pivano, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Julian Beck, Judith Malina, as well as exhibitions by Max Capa and Lorenzo Mattotti. Also in 1979 he approaches photography, thanks to a workshop with the American photographer Will McBride, held during the Venice 79 - Photography event. In 1980, on the occasion of a seminar with the reporter Tony D'Urso of Odin Teatret, he took several shots at the Santarcangelo di Romagna theater festival, shortly after launching the series of black and white photographs Ritratti Naoniani (1980-1982), dedicated to the punk and post-punk scene of Pordenone, at the time dominated by the artistic-musical movement of The Great Complotto. In this context, he photographed the members of the various groups of the movement, simultaneously giving life to the ghost-group of the Mind Invaders, whose non-existent concerts were however reviewed by various sector magazines, and by some fanzines ("115/220", "Onda 400 " and "50%", the latter born together with Vittore Baroni). Also in the early eighties Ciani began to modify his black and white photographs through the use of color xerography, meeting the interest of photography historians such as Italo Zannier, who defined his shots as rock photography, placing them side by side with those of Bruno Munari, with whom he actually exhibited on some occasions, and Claudio Marra. In addition to the specificity of the photographic world, his experiments between photography and xerography are also recorded in various studies and exhibitions on Copy art, as well as in editorial art projects such as Elettrographics (Pavia, Edinform 1984), a portfolio curated by Maria Grazia Mattei which also includes works by Bruno Munari, Stefano Tamburini, Pierluigi Vannozzi and Giacomo Spazio. In addition to the series of Naonian portraits, also transformed by the icy colors of xerography, the series A cost of repeating myself, Histoire d'A, Dal video and Interpretations of the Po were subsequently born, again during the 1980s.

Trax (1981-1987)
In parallel with the photo-xerographic research, in 1981 Ciani developed the Trax project (1981-1987) together with Vittore Baroni and Massimo Giacon, self-defined by the group as a modular system with unlimited modularity involving a total of over 500 artists and musicians from all over the world. Escaping any definition, Trax draws on industrial and electronic music, copy art, mail art, cut-up and verbal-visual research. All the productions of the project - artist magazines, vinyls, cassettes, audiomagazines, comics, folders of xerographies, graphic interventions, T-shirts and performances - are documented in the volume that closes the Trax experience, Last Trax (1987), written enriched by postcards, artist's stamps and a vinyl that also includes a soundtrack by the designer Ettore Sottsass. Within the Trax catalogue, Ciani mainly dealt with the graphic design of the various productions, starting with those entirely conceived by him, such as Trax 0681 XACT, which actually started the project. In these years Ciani's graphic-communicative activity also developed in the field of Mail art, producing in particular postcards and artist's stamps. In this context it maintains both exchanges of creative communications with various international artists of the mail-artistic network - such as Ryosuke Cohen, Vittore Baroni, GX Jupitter-Larsen, Guy Bleus and Masami Akita - and events, such as the traveling exhibition of xerographic postcards Rispondere a toner ( 1987), or Strange correspondences (Villorba di Treviso, Villa Fanna, 1989), and coordinated communication projects, such as the logo for the Decentralized World Congress of Mail art held in 1992.

The 90's
During the nineties, in addition to the graphic production also for national publishers such as Stampa Alternate by Marcello Baraghini, with whom he had already collaborated in the previous decade and photographic research which in these years saw the advent of scanners and PCs as reworking tools, Ciani gives life to some alter egos, such as Stickerman and Luther Blissett. Stickerman, in collaboration with Vittore Baroni, is one of the first projects that anticipates the use of adhesives as an artistic-communicative medium. In addition to a dense production of ludic-conceptual stickers, the Stickerman project has led to the creation of a fanzine (also adhesive), "Sticker news", an album for collecting stickers and, in 1992, a museum, the Stickerman Museum in Viareggio. The experience of the Luther Blissett Project, started in 1995, of which Ciani was one of the first promoters, together, among many others, with Vittore Baroni, Roberto Bui and Stewart Home, whose events have been retraced from a vast bibliography, is more complex. international. A section within the exhibition Interrupted Paths was dedicated to the Luther Blissett Project and its most famous events. Crisis and iconoclasm in the arts from the 1950s to the end of the century (Bassano del Grappa, Palazzo Bonaguro, 17 June - 20 August 2000), curated by Roberto Bui and Ciani himself.

In 1996, together with Vittore Baroni, he founded the AAA editions publishing house, based in Bertiolo, whose publications started with a publication on Luther Blissett. The publishing house will be active until Ciani's death in 2006, structuring itself into two distinct collections: Apo-X, dedicated to the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde of the twentieth century, from Surrealism to the Metropolitan Indians, from the Dutch Provos to Mail art, and the Artisti Booksellers Associati, centered on the experimental book-object. The experience of the AAA editions was attended by both communication and art historians, such as Claudia Salaris, and numerous artists, such as Gianluca Lerici, Pablo Echaurren, Matteo Guarnaccia and Enrico Baj. Again during the 1990s he developed the series of collages (later multiplied through the creative use of the photocopier) Apropos di arte, started in 1991. It is a series of ironic works close to visual poetry that meditate on the ephemeral concept of art, through a maniacal cataloging of their use in the press, always in non-artistic contexts (The art of making bread, The art of fraud, etc.). These works are also presented in historic exhibition events linked to verbal-visual research, such as 1897-1997: from the shot of dice to visual poetry, curated by Enrico Mascelloni and Sarenco in 1998 at the Palazzo della Ragione in Mantua.

The 2000's
In the early 2000s Ciani continued his photographic experiments using scanners and computers, for example in the Piu' o meno 4/4 series, which involves the creative decomposition and recomposition of the faces of friends, family and artists, or in the Mi feel in pieces (2001), ironic fragmentation of the artist's body through a series of photographic postcards elaborated in computer graphics. However, the most significant experience of these years is the F.U.N. - FUNtastic United Nation, launched in 2001 in collaboration with Emanuela Biancuzzi and again with Vittore Baroni, which led to the creation of postage stamps (since 2001), banknotes (2003) and artist's holy cards (2005), all produced by AAA editions, as well as group exhibitions and art events. Among these FUN of FUN (18 and 19 September 2004) and SUN of FUN (10-11 September 2005), both held in Casier, at the PARCO Foundation. The FUN project is documented in an unpublished volume, whose preparatory materials are enclosed in number 91 of "Postal Art!", entirely dedicated to Piermario Ciani in the first year after the artist's death in 2006. From 2023 the archive by Piermario Ciani is conserved in the 20th century archive of the Mart in Rovereto.