For Piero Golia, art is a magical medium—a means to conjure unpredictable experiences of collective engagement and playful interaction. Follies is an artist's book of images and words—an exploration of Golia's imagery and an articulation of his personal understanding of art.
"Structures that prioritize aesthetic delight over functional utility, follies challenge traditional notions of art by blending personal stories with public spectacle. They're not about the function, but about the effect." In the same spirit of these architectural caprices, Golia's artworks tend toward spectacle, creating impractical objects and unexpected situations that defy purpose in order to generate beauty and wonder.
From discreet gestures to large-scale productions, collaborative and monumental works; from the glow of a solitary sphere atop a Los Angeles hotel—lit when Golia was in town, dark when he wasn't—to a plane slicing through the sky, dragging behind a banner that promises, or threatens, "The best is yet to come," the artist's gestures unfold like strange celebrations. Fireworks burst. Marching bands appear, then vanish. A monumental staircase, the longest in Los Angeles, suspended at its extremities, rises and leads nowhere. The images and text gathered in this book compose a narrative account of Golia's practice—a constellation of spectacle and poetry, teetering on the edge of the absurd and the sublime.
As a career's start, Piero Golia (*1974, Naples, Italy) successfully convinced a woman to have his portrait and the words "Piero My Idol" tattooed on her back (tattoo, 2001); soon after, following an invitation to the Tirana Biennale, he rowed across the Adriatic Sea in the opposite direction to migratory movement to reach Albania ("Going to Tirana"). And, on January 14, 2005, Golia vanished from New York City leaving no documented proof of his whereabouts; he traveled from a place to another, crossing borders without a trace, for resurfacing only on the morning of February 7 at the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen for a unique lecture about his adventurous trip.
He now lives in Los Angeles, a place that blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, making it the perfect setting for his exploration into the process of myth-making and his ironic outlook on contemporary society.
