Brescia, an exhibition at the Santa Giulia Museum puts David LaChapelle in dialogue with Giacomo Ceruti

David LaChapelle for Giacomo Ceruti. Nomad in a Beautiful Land is an original photographic exhibition featuring a never-before-seen work executed by the celebrated American artist for Brescia and inspired by the pauperistic production of Giacomo Ceruti known as il Pitocchetto (Milan, 1698 - 1767). The Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, the museum that preserves the highest number of Ceruti’s works in the world, will host this shot to narrate, through a new and contemporary language, the rooms usually dedicated to the painter of the last. Together with the series Jesus is my homeboy (2003), LaChapelle’s new photography will creep between the dense folds of the present to provide a careful and conscious interpretation of marginality: an ode to social decadence.

Playing with a blatant ambivalence of languages, the exhibition aims to structure an exhibition and touring architecture, in which the classical universe of Giacomo Ceruti meets the imagery of David LaChapelle, in a museum synergy between Fondazione Brescia Musei and the Getty Center that will see Ceruti’s pauperistic works land in Los Angeles. At the same time, this engaging challenge will bring the series Jesus is my homeboy (2003), accompanied by LaChapelle’s newest work Gated Community, to the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo. Classical art and photography open up to dialogue, bringing their formal differences into play in order to shake up a contemporaneity plagued by relational aridity. Gated Community, shot in Los Angels in December 2022, depicts an ideological staging of the sacred and the profane, in which a very long tent city, a refuge for the homeless, crowds the city’s sidewalks, coloring them with Hollywood opulence.

David LaChapelle(Fairfield, CT, 1963) is one of the most celebrated and esteemed living photographers and a masterful interpreter of the darkest contemporary critical issues. There is a drama in his images that can transcend the often charged and deliberately provocative exterior to descend into a real dimension.

For LaChapelle, the last take on the philosophical semblance of a chimera of earthly emotionality: plastic, unrealistically perfect bodies, bearers of a seemingly unquestionable happiness, expressed by eyes that are sincere and inconsolable at the same time. Throughout his photographic corpus, from Deluge (2006) to the recent and prophetic Revelations (2019), via Heaven to Hell (2006), LaChapelle has been striving for decades to awaken the public from a castrating torpor, showing how poverty is the rotten fruit of an equally diseased society and thus destined to remain inherent in all of us.

For all information, you can visit the official website of Fondazione Brescia Musei.

Brescia, an exhibition at the Santa Giulia Museum puts David LaChapelle in dialogue with Giacomo Ceruti

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