Andrea Crespi's WE ARE EMOJI at Art Lucerna Gallery

From July 5 to 20, 2026, Art Lucerna Gallery in Castiglione della Pescaia presents WE ARE EMOJI, a solo exhibition by Andrea Crespi curated by Alisia Viola. The show explores emoji as a universal visual language, examining how these digital symbols shape communication, identity, and perception. Crespi's paintings use thousands of emoji to create images that appear coherent from afar but fragment into individual signs up close, challenging the viewer's perspective. The exhibition includes portraits of four historical artists who used symbols and visual synthesis in their work, reimagined through contemporary emoji. Crespi also inverts semantic meanings, pairing emoji with contradictory words to highlight ambiguity. The project connects emoji to ancient pictographic systems like hieroglyphs, positioning them as a modern universal alphabet. The works invite reflection on how visual language evolves in the digital age, revealing complexity beneath apparent simplicity.