Independent curator, critic, and pulp-fiction connoisseur Alessandro Riva explores a current that has run through Italian art for the past decade and a half: the return to traditional genres—landscape, portrait, and still life—as vehicles for addressing contemporary problems of identity and meaning. Bringing together some one hundred works—not only paintings, drawings, and sculptures, but also films, videos, and installations—by seventy Italian artists under the age of forty-five, Riva defines our moment with respect to this key artistic phenomenon, whereby traditional genres have been productively contaminated by “low” influences such as noir, pulp, pornography, and comic strips.
