Gian Maria Tosatti

In his artistic practice, Gian Maria Tosatti (Rome, 1980) perceives the city as a double, an analogy of the spirit, in which the human being’s inner forms are divided into a concrete composition. While relating to urban space as already experienced in other cities – Rome (Devotions, 2005-2011); New York (I’ve Already Been Here, 2011-ongoing) – in Naples the artist for the first time had the unique opportunity to use the whole city as a potential space of intervention. 

In the ideation and creation of the striking project Sette Stagioni dello Spirito(“Seven Seasons of the Spirit”), from 2013 to 2016, Tosatti retraced the course of The Interior Castle (1577), the book in which St. Teresa of Avila divides the human soul into seven chambers, and transfigured them into so many monumental environmental installations, ordered like the progressive chapters of a book that interlaces literary and philosophical sources, historical and theological references, figures, thoughts and stories.

It is a work with a narrative and theoretical matrix and in progressive formation, aimed at redefining the relations between art and community – between the artwork and the social and anthropological fabric – and conceived as a single great visual and performative novel that, by exploring the city and the community dimension of civil living, connects the absolute of the ethical element with our historical present and the conflicts and lacerations that characterize it. 

In this way, the artist’s seven site-specific interventions/chapters have enabled the reopening and gradual recovery of certain historical buildings and monuments, abandoned or neglected in Naples, which have been radically transformed by the artist in the last three years. These places have become radiating points for works that, from the human sphere, have expanded into the urban one, often reviving whole neighborhoods