Art, Youth And Color – An Interview With Lorenzo Amos
Lorenzo Amos (@whylorenzo) is an interesting young visual artist that is currently based in Milan. As part of an editorial effort of Business & Arts to shine a spotlight on relevant Milanese artistic realities, Luca (@luca.rizzii) sat down with him in his studio to discuss painting, post-human art and social media.
Pictures by @federicoearth.
Luca: In other conversations you’ve told me that you were always close to art, how did this start out for you and when did you realize you wanted to be an artist?
Lorenzo: I always painted and drew, I used to draw a lot when I was a kid but never as constantly as now. In the past year or two I realized that that’s what I wanna do in life, that’s what makes me happy. Creating has always been the main thing for me but now I’m focused and dedicated to painting.
Luca: So would you say you’ve moved through different mediums?
Lorenzo: I’ve always been a visual artist. At one point, I really liked fashion but I’m slowly moving out of it. I realized I can't really express what I want through fashion as a medium. I never designed clothing or anything, just a couple of small experiments, but i realized that, like i said, i wasn’t able to express what i want.
It takes lots of time to find your own because when you’re like 18-20 you’re still considered as a kid, it’s hard to work seriously until you’re taken seriously. When people started to take me more seriously I was able to work more seriously, I saw that maybe what i’m doing is actually worth something. A lot of times when you create, when you paint, until somebody else acknowledges the work it’s difficult to continue working. I listen to other people’s opinions but not too much, you know? You always have to filter it. It helps to listen to what somebody has to say about your work but not all the time, and the end of the day art is subjective.
Luca: You have recently done some experiments with digitally generated artworks, what do you think about it as a medium? Do you think in the future we will have fully post-human art?
Lorenzo: I think art is only art if it’s recognized by a conscious being. Without any humans alive to acknowledge the existence of art there would be no art, but I guess that’s the case with all human constructs. I’m a huge fan of artificially generated art, and I think it’s important for young artists, any artist, to play with new mediums. Personally it’s just exciting to see what an algorithm can do and produce, it’s a complete new form of abstraction. I think that art could be done completely without human intervention, if the algorithm is capable enough it’s already like that in a way.
I could input 30 of my paintings, the algorithm will study them for some time and it will recreate like 50 things that it believes are similar to the painting, it’s always correcting itself, always learning.
I think this is art, if there’s an idea behind it and a human recognizes it as art, it is art. That is all it takes, for it to be recognized by someone as art, doesn’t make it good art, doesn’t make it bad art either just… art.
Pictures by @federicoearth.
Luca: Many painters and artists state that their art is about “something”, a certain subject matter. Some say their art is about color, about time, about space, about truth…Would you say that your art has a specific subject matter?
Lorenzo: It really depends on what i’m doing. Right now I’m working on a series of paintings that I believe express the anxiety of the repetitive cycles of social media. I catch myself lots of times cycling through social media and comparing myself to other people that I shouldn’t care about. I have these moments where I feel like I’m controlled by this one, homogeneous stream of media that’s even worse than local news, at least local news controls the town, social media controls an entire generation of people.
I think that’s what the new series is about. If I'm doing a portrait it’s just to express some sensibility of whoever the subject is, other times it’s an emotion. For the AI art it’s mostly about the concept of the AI doing the art. The paintings I was doing in New York, in the beginning, were an exploration of color, an exploration of my sensibility, developing my taste with what I was learning and experiencing in that period.
Luca: How do you feel the city you live in affects your painting?
Lorenzo: Definitely the colors and the forms change. In the new paintings there’s colors I see in my daily life. The colors reflect, in a very subconscious way, what I'm seeing, what surrounds me. The first paintings I was doing in New York, were inspired by the city. I did a series of 7 paintings. There were fireworks every night, for some reason lots of illegal fireworks got to NY this summer and they were selling for like a tenth of the price, so every single night there were fireworks, I would see them every night, right in front of me, outside my window. I was doing these very colorful paintings with the whole spectrum of colors, that was a really big inspiration for me at the time.
Now I’m using these hues of red, this green-ish teal-ish, almost mint color that reminds me of the sky of Milan. Also there’s some colors I'm comfortable with, silver for me, chrome, is a representation of the city, the urban environment, reflective surfaces you can do graffiti on. I always add a bit of silver, it just makes me feel more at home i guess.
Luca: The thing everyone in the art world is talking about right now are NFTs. What do you think they can offer to young artists?
Lorenzo: I like the idea of NFTs. They were really popping in 2017 because there was a crypto boom, they died down after that. In the past month for some reason everyone learned what an NFT is. This NFT boom is interesting, the idea of owning something that is not a physical item is not new, think about those kids that play Fortnite or CS:GO, they spend thousands of dollars a year on in-game items. Digital ownership is not that weird, at the end of the day if you can show it off why not buy it? All you have to do is project an NFT, I saw there’s like these screens, these NFT frames you can buy, that project art on a loop. I’m personally working on some NFTs right now with my good friend Max from New York, he’s taking care of the blockchain part and I’m giving him the art. We decided to use the AI art I was telling you about, the Generative Adversarial Networks.
Pictures by @federicoearth.
I honestly think lots of people see NFTs as just another way to make money, there’s a lot of crypto people who have Ethereum to invest. It’s a new kind of asset, it’s interesting, it just shows the way society is, it doesn’t even matter if you have a physical object at this point, you just need to be able to say that you have it, that’s all people care about “I have this, look at me, i have an NFT”. I don’t think that this necessarily makes NFT art bad, it’s a new form, a blank canvas, it's up to the artists what they put in the frame. And we have to see where it goes, how it influences history, that’s what’s important.
Luca: And what do you think about the market dimension of NFTs?
Lorenzo: Even if for most people it’s just another way to make money, that’s what art in general is for some, it’s not limited to NFTs. I don’t want to name names but I think lots of people who are artists just produce commodities, merchandise almost. I hope to not be that. Sometimes I catch myself doing something for a reason that isn’t aligned with my ethics, and I try to stop that, but it can happen to anybody. Lots of people are obsessed with the artist as opposed to the work, a lot of artists’ persona really overshadow the work. I’d like to separate myself from my persona, I know I have a strong personality and I can be flamboyant but the important thing is the art, not the character. The character doesn’t really exist, it’s made up, you mean something different to everyone you meet. It’s the means by which you can express your art but it ultimately doesn’t last. It’s the art that lasts. Focus on the art, not on building a character.
Luca: Going back to what you were saying before about your most recent series of paintings, what role does this element of social media repetition play in your art and life right now?
Lorenzo: It’s just this feeling that it’s all going away so quickly. These cycles of repetition, they’re making me crazy. Scrolling, getting out of Instagram and then going back into it 3 seconds later, scrolling again for 20 minutes and I didn’t realize. I logged out of Instagram because I had that fleeting moment of “okay, I’m wasting my time” and then after 3 seconds I forget about it, and I go back to it again. It’s just a repeated cycle, a programmed addiction.
Luca: It’s a minimal level of entertainment, enough to keep you going…
Pictures by @federicoearth.