Columns - Surface
by Sabrina Ciofi
by Sabrina Ciofi
Eroticism, nostalgia, a marked aesthetic sensibility, and reality as a place of wonder define the work of Nik Gallo (Bari, 1989). His creativity is hard to contain and hard to categorize, and so is his output: his painting yields canvases and watercolors that fall within the category of art, but also objects classifiable as textile decoration. His experience as a fashion designer—for nearly a decade he was knitwear designer at MSGM, a role he recently left in order to accommodate his multiform expressive need—generates limited runs of knitwear. His passion for classical and popular art, for the archive, and for research produces a personal collection of decorative motifs that, reworked digitally, become elements embroidered by haute couture artisans onto second-hand garments; home textiles are assembled from the remnants of old trousseaux and decorated with crochet interventions and slogans written in old passementerie; selections of artworks, ceramics, and objects by minor authors, unearthed among the myriad disused things in neighborhood and online flea markets, take the form of a collection that, together with all the other artifacts, returns Nik Gallo’s dream world to reality.
In 2013 he opened an Instagram account that in less than twelve months reached more than one hundred thousand followers, and he is among the most relevant figures in the contemporary fashion system; a result obtained “simply” by selecting images from the web according to his own highly personal vision. What emerged was a visual language still imitated by magazines, art directors, stylists, and creatives. Nik Gallo chose fashion as his subject of study—he graduated in fashion design from the IED in Milan—when it was still an erotic discipline, bound to desire and to the imagination, to the materialization of identity, of sexuality, and of the body. A multiform discipline that allows one to look at the same object each time from a different perspective, and that generates different results while following the same methodology. A discipline, and a professional practice, that requires a deep general culture, necessary in order to open paths of meaning within the chaos and improvisation that imagination, experimentation, and novelty carry with them by their very nature.
To create is to set in motion one or more pseudo-rational devices for navigating the blinding glare of the imagination. But obviously none of this makes any sense in today’s fashion, carved out of the logic of finance and the philosophy of a product conceived for an audience that justifies any means in the name of success. So returning to the primordial heat of imagination and of a creative practice that cannot be catalogued by product category is a nostalgic act, or perhaps a childish strategy for survival. An experiment, a leap into the void with the only parachute being the certainty of what one is not willing to give up in order to recognize oneself in the mirror. Fashion is a system founded on the commodification of creativity. The imbalance in favor of the corporate business model is producing interesting reflections and alternative projects among young people ever less interested in sacrificing their imagination—a.k.a. creativity—to a highly pretentious industry, greedy for gratification and with a distribution of profit that is neither democratic nor meritocratic. This column carries no images. The only way to see Nik Gallo’s work is to type his name into your search engine.