Yuri Pirondi

Yuri Pirondi (May 16, 1984, Modena, Italy) is an Italian artist. He is known for his lens based works, using video and photography, in particularly work as Tarocco (Tarot).
Early Life
Grow up in the rural hills of Apennines Mountains in Italy, Yuri Pirondi degree as “Master of Art” at the Art Institute “A. Venturi” of Modena in Photography and Visual Arts.
Pirondi started his career in Modena (Italy) working as a photographer, where he came across the world of the theatre and establish collaboration with performance artists.
Art Practice
Yuri Pirondi moved to London, attempting to embrace the vivid cultural life. His love for the portraiture and the performing art stimulated him to collaborate with numerous theatre companies and Live Art practitioners. During this instance he recognize the video as a perfect tool to explore the dynamism of the body language.
Pirondi begun to explore the moving image in different way: video art, collaborative performance for the camera, documentaries, featured and short movies.
In 2011 Yuri Pirondi founded Magma (collective) with other two artists: Jaime Valtierra and Ines von Bonhorst.
His art deals largely with the central themes of human consciousness and experience, from a sensorial one: birth, death, love, emotion to a socio-political one like war, loneliness and the idea of abandoned.
Pirondi's art practice can be subdivided in three main types: photography, video art and featured movies.
Photography
Pirondi's photographs are a instinctive collaboration with performance artists, with the aim of the creation of images that goes beyond the meaning of portraiture, results of a constant creative balance between the photographer and the subject. The main topics of his photographs is the abandonment, present as the documentation of urban derelict and the life of people left behind by our society.
Few of the most popular photographic series are Tarocco, Ships and Void Shades
Tarocco
Inspired by the Tarot card tradition, known to have originated in North Italy in the 15th Century, this project represents the artist interpretation of each character of the deck.
Tarot cards, believed by many to hold divinatory powers, give the reader great insight into the future. With countless interpretations, the main objective of this project was to give a personal perspective based on a reading of the present rather than the future.
To do this, Pirondi observed the people of his environment; those he interacted with on a day to day basis. Pirondi found artists with a strong, genuine moral strength, who had become immersed in their own creative spaces; caught up in their own worlds.
The portraits intimate portrayals of each; each card, each picture with a unique story to tell, each relating to a particular character from the deck and their experience of the place represented; a modern day interpretation of an ancient tradition.
Ships
This series is based on abandoned factories left behind, where this huge buildings are abandoned to themselves, places where workers toiled and sweated day after day.
Pirondi pictured the carcasses that remained, to remind an industrial flourishing time that now is converted in rust.
These "ships" are the mirror of a contemporary economical situation, sign of an adrift industrial activity.
Void Shades
Void Shades is staged in dark and empty spaces of the city, these areas are outlined by the shadows and the architecture of the buildings.
They represents empty canvases where is possible to see anything that provoke or stimulate us.
Pirondi's work is inspired by the Allegory of the Cave by Plato, where the prisoners couldn't move and the only thing that they could see was their own shadows.
Void Shades embraces the idea of "container", transforming the cavern in a city, and the shadows of the prisoners in the passersby ones.
Video Art
Pirondi's Video Art practice is based on the creation of evocative imaginary representing the consciousness of life, through the collaboration with performers.
The most populars Video Art installations are The Guise and Emergencia
The Guise
The Guise describes symbolically the human condition through the notion of Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
A performer tied to an ancient oak described how our society is attached to our history and our life, this performance for the camera shows how is hard to break through the barrier of social change. The Guise is the thin line between what we believe and what is reality, questioning on the possibility to conform ourselves to the rules of the society where we born.
Emergencia
Emergencia is a performative video inspired by the allegory of Plato's Cave, narrating the light seen by the prisoner outside the cavern.
Prisoner's first reaction at the view of mountains, lakes and fields is pure astonishment, and fear of the unknown, it tooks him a while to assimilate his new freedom.
The piece is questioning if this first primordial freedom is insight to everyone of us, and how can be reflected in a urban context, relegated to the lines and the spaces of the city.
Films
Yuri Pirondi works at the production of movies and documentaries as director and cinematographer.
His last documentary Tierra Firme (Solid Ground) is a provocative journey through the emotional and physical landscape of Social Political Theatre in Bolivia, Colombia and Brazil.

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