Alexandre Diop, young talent from the 2022 mentorship program

"'Art is an act of activism'. So says Alexandre Diop, the artist that Galleria Poggiali has invited to exhibit his 11 works that make up the first chapter of the project "The Symphony of the Ghetto" and that tell, with a street art style and more classical painting, a story of our present. "This," Diop adds, "is the result of years of training in this world of a young man, a young activist doing politics. It's as if I were an MEP who comes to Italy and brings a discussion around these dystopian images that speak to a culture very close to mine, being a French-Senegalese artist." According to Marco Poggiali, the gallery owner: "Our mission is to promote young people and this is important for many reasons, first of all because it challenges us, both personally and commercially as a gallery. Diop's works exhibited in Milan begin with an autobiography of the artist and take the form of a single work, a sum of episodes that together find their dimension. It is as if each individual painting only makes sense in the confrontation with its community. This too can be considered a form of activism."

"Under the title “The next time, the fire”, Alexandre Diop has deployed on the two floors of the Studio des Acacias a personal space where he presents his works made with all kinds of materials found in everyday life. On the ground floor On the ground floor, visitors find themselves surrounded by ten canvases in monumental formats described as “image-objects” by the artist: drawing from both classical painting and urban art, the character silhouettes that emerge from their surface are drawn from coins, various fabrics, metal rods and other book pages... A painting by his mentor Kehinde Wiley completes this presentation rooted in the imagination of African culture and the African diaspora: on this work of great height, the American artist and official portraitist of Barack Obama has represented, in the tradition of portraiture and history painting, two young black men holding hands with tenderness against a colorful background decorated with patterns. Upstairs, Alexandre Diop offers a hybrid and more domestic space, like his Viennese studio. Drawings of various sizes, works in smaller formats, objects and other wooden sculptures from the artist's personal collection, here hung on the wall or arranged on tables and chairs, immerse in his abundant imagination."