The big burnout - Guglielmo Maggini

THE BIG BURNOUT’ is the new site-specific work by artist Guglielmo Maggini, created for Porta Medina in Orbetello. A festoon of bright resins surrounds the Porta Medina’s façade, inviting the viewer to enter and take part in the explosion of luminous warm colours that envelop the inner vault of Orbetello’s 17th-century gate.

The symbolism inherent in the element of the city gate changes, becoming the psychological place of the collective unconscious: an authentic defence system that simultaneously becomes an intimate cavity to enter, a threshold of contact between the natural and artificial world, historical and personal memory.

Maggini creates ‘THE BIG BURNOUT’ as an expression of resilience and strength against fragility, thus exorcising otherness in its disturbing essence.

Guglielmo Maggini was born in Rome in 1992. The artist’s work moves between sculpture and installation. His forms ironically con-fuse different plastic materials in an organic proliferation of elements and gestures.

After graduating in Architecture from the Università Degli Studi di Roma Tre, he moved to London, where he obtained a master’s degree in Visual Arts at UAL – Camberwell College of Arts. He then moved to New York, starting a professional collaboration with artist/designer Gaetano Pesce, and became his assistant.

In an imaginary and personal place where space is understood as a plastic volume, the artist aims to investigate the psychological perception of time in a constantly liquid cross-reference between classical heritage, the natural world and references to pop culture.