Galleria Michela Rizzo is pleased to present Obsolete Technologies and Simple Production Processes, the first solo exhibition by Cesare Pietroiusti, opening Saturday, October 5, at 12.

Cesare Pietroiusti (Rome, 1955) presents himself as a conceptual and performance artist. However, these tags are insufficient to capture the complexity of his research. Pietroiusti acts in a trans-disciplinary way, contaminating artistic research with philosophy, politics, natural sciences, jurisprudence and sociology. His works move transversally in the world of visual arts, his artistic production is conceived as the creation of ideas as well as objects. Pietroiusti interest in paradoxical and seemingly insignificant situations turns out to be crucial; he highlights how these often overlooked aspects can become engines of analysis and representation.
The exhibition explores new and historical works, exemplifying simple and obsolete techniques, such as the use of typewriters, slides or stamps. The intent is to transform the gallery into a workshop, a place of production, dialogue and exchange with the public.
Visitors will be welcomed by the artwork Reproduction of "My Best Painting Ever" (2024), an image whose genesis will be understood at the end of the exhibition.
The Wall of Drawings (created with fire in 2024) is a project specifically conceived for the gallery’s context. It offers the potential buyer of the Wall (whether a public or a private one, museum or collector) the opportunity (and the commitment) to gift each of their guests (whether they are visitors of an exhibition or invited to a dinner) a drawing by the artist. With this work, which essentially sells the possibility of giving, Pietroiusti plays, once again, on the field of economics, attempting to question the rigidity and uniformity of its mechanisms.
In front, a series of conceptual maps become the birthplace and analysis of the works themselves, presenting as projects, captions, comments, and bibliographical references to other works, or even as simply “drawings”.
In a passageway, one can listen to NEWTON, the artist’s new record produced by XING for Xong collection - artist records. A collection of sounds captured from the accidental falling of objects, recorded between February and April of this year. NEWTON is a sound work that seeks not only to explore the relationship between the ordinary and the exceptional, but also to reflect on the importance of our relationship with gravity—a relationship made up of resistance and submission, of use and failure.
Another work, “Pinocchio” nuovo con gomma, Trieste Zona A, 1954, 25 Lire rosa carminio sovrastampato I-VI (2022), consists in a series of small posters reproducing the stamp issued by the Italian Post office dedicated to Pinocchio in 1954.
A stamp that, through a curious coincidence of timing, becomes a testament to a historical event: the return of Trieste to Italy, nearly ten years after the end of World War II. This work by Pietroiusti touches on several issues, ranging from the artist’s relationship with his father (a passionate stamp collector), the trends in the collectibles market (whether for stamps or artworks), the relationship between the integrity and fragmentation of the collectible object, to the status of a “video-document” presented in the exhibition, which is unusually proposed by the artist as a “certificate” of authenticity for the artwork.
The exhibition concludes on the upper floor with a Working Room, where visitors can observe some works created by Pietroiusti starting from the early 80s, re-try old production techniques (such as copying images projected from slides), and engage in the creation of new works.

Obsolete Technologies and Simple Production Processes is an invitation to reflect on the role of art in contemporary society, on the value of the creative process and the importance of the active participation of the public. Through his practice, Pietroiusti challenges the very concept of art, proposing an idea in which randomness and sharing, divergent thinking and play become fundamental elements of a transformative and enlightening artistic experience.