Piero Addis Blends Digital and Painting in Blue Codes Blue at IIC Sydney

Piero Addis's solo exhibition 'Blue Codes blue' at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Sydney (6 Oct – 3 Nov 2016) merges digital photography with traditional painting. Curated by David Galloway, the show presents mixed-media works on canvas where Addis overlays his own airplane window photographs of the sky with celestial scenes from Giambattista Tiepolo's paintings, all rendered in a dominant blue palette. Addis explains he 'breaks the pixels of digital photography with manual intervention' to create ambiguity between photography and painting. The title references flight codes from his recent travels (LH3959 Milan-Frankfurt, AF511 Damascus-Paris, SU279 Moscow-Milan). The exhibition reworks ten pieces from a previous Milan show, now using only blue in various tones, applied with electronic brush alongside watercolor, ink, pencil, and chalk. Addis cites Raoul Dufy's assertion that blue is the only color strong enough to remain blue. He notes that both he and Tiepolo are travelers; Tiepolo created frescoes in Würzburg and Madrid. Addis, former Head of Arts and Culture for the 2006 Turin Olympics, plans a trilogy observing the sky from a terrestrial perspective, with a future show in New York next year.