From February 15 to March 8, 2019, the illuminated sign “Dildo” lit up in Via Palazzuolo, announcing the opening of a new supermarket chain with employees, shopping carts and consumer goods of all kinds. Dildo – a group exhibition by Hogre, DoubleWhy and Illustre Feccia, three contemporary situation artists, fundamentalists of the practice of subversion and sworn enemies of consumer society and its pre-packaged products.
The exhibition insisted on the concept of subvertising, a term derived from the contraction of the Anglo-Saxon words subvert and advertising, a practice of “creative vandalization” of advertising posters that pokes fun at society’s consumption system and the monopoly of advertising in urban visual space.

The works on display represent an “exploration of the obscene aspect of consumption,” as Doublewhy explains: “The logic of porn, which is antithetical to eroticism, turns the other into an object to be used and consumed. In this act of consumption, the self dissolves and is suspended in the fetish object.”

Dildo, whose sign traces the graphic and chromatic composition of a real supermarket, brought to the Street Levels Gallery the Massoni lemonades, the Nestrip cocoa-flavored and (fake) lysergic acid and the DioScotto durum wheat spaghetti: representations that embody a deliberately desecrating and provocative spirit, prompting viewers to question their daily interactions with reality and material.

ALTRO