Digital art is now a well-established category of art. In the last year I have been to several exhibitions featuring it. Just a month ago I was in Parma, for the Festival of Contemporary Creativity – Parma 360 – and I noticed how everything revolved around the digital world, from AI to animated and non-animated illustrations. One of the artists I had the pleasure of seeing again was Svccy, who was already in my sights years ago. What this artist, very young by the way, is doing is interesting from a contemporary perspective, especially talking about trends. In fact, his art is inspired by the Vaporwave current, albeit with a somewhat darker variant that reflects on the condition of the human being today, in an age that is seeing more and more hybridization between the natural and the artificial and, even more, that is heading toward an over-consumerism at the limit of the tolerable.
When I speak of trend I mean that some distinctive features of this current, the Vaporwave, which by the way originated in the field of music and then influenced many of the visual arts, are often found in contemporary graphic and aesthetic choices. Fluorescent colors, the purple and blue tones of 1980s neon, pixelated fonts, or even a mix between classicism and the digital world, all of which proliferate just about everywhere. The nostalgia that this current brings up is well made explicit by the abandoned environments, another characteristic of this aesthetic. All this is clearly visible in Svccy’s art, which reflects on themes such as identity, authenticity, and illusory freedom.
Svccy creates statuesque human figures, faceless or concealed by objects, eloquent symbols of our age. This approach represents the lack of individual identity, an increasingly relevant theme in our hyper-connected and globalized world. So, if Vaporwave was born around 2010, when we were still at the dawn of this new digital age, today, that sometimes all this seems to be bigger than us, this imagery is even more fitting. The figures seem almost suspended in time and space, trapped in a reality where personal identity is often obscured or sacrificed to conform to social expectations.
The musical origin of this current is taken up by Svccy in his works that complement the visual aspect with sound. The music is perfectly synchronized with the animations, amplifying the return to the audience. Everything I see when looking at his works is a reflection of myself and, more generally, of my entire generation, engaged in a struggle to maintain its own personal individuality in the face of a society that wants us to be uniform. The hypnotic and disturbing aspect that the artist conveys is undoubtedly powerful in this sense, allowing for a tense enjoyment.
