Luciano Caggianello

Luciano Caggianello’s work draws from his background in design, illustration, and advertising, bringing a clear sense of structure and visual thinking to his practice. He’s interested in how images and language shape our perception, often working with layered forms and conceptual ideas. His recent projects reflect on systems, habits, and the space between clarity and ambiguity. Now based in Turin, he continues to develop his approach through writing and visual experimentation.

Ming Defragmentation - Digital, 2025

Q: You’ve moved between design, advertising, and conceptual art. What drives you to keep shifting perspectives?

A: I have often changed perspective for the pleasure of exploring new environments but also to avoid being imprisoned within a context, however broad and culturally lively, as well as any perimeters and clichés inevitably present in every sector. In fact, our spasmodically mimetic society trusts in the conventions of its public and makes what is simply enclosed in an appropriate frame appear real. Frames and perimeters are often powerful inhibitors for growth and research in a general sense.

The daily life with which we interface has nevertheless produced a luxurious and spectacular shortage because we have lost the ability to have an exchange relationship with other individuals. Exchange, above all, if disinterested, produces the true wealth of a society since it is always unlimited even among a small circle of individuals. The wealthy society has become only a society of accumulation and power in all its logic and in all its cultural, productive, intellectual emanations. In fact, even in an intellectual exchange there is an infinite and exponential dialectic that overturns the eloquence of scarcity. Even ideas can be a structural and enriching contribution, a surplus of opulence that our society has now forgotten or pretended to forget for reasons of opportunism, power as well as precise logics of accumulation. The society in which we live has also transformed the concept of equality into that of homogeneity. People feel equal to others because they are apparently "homogeneous" but in fact they are not equal.

What I try to do through my artistic research is to propose a reflection, a cue, an exchange of concepts, even at a distance, so that everyone can find a way to trace a sensation and consequently obtain dialectical material from it. Even what we define as objective reality passes through an individual, therefore subjective, experience of the world, and is then translated onto a symbolic level and consequently transformed into an objective parameter. 

Therefore, a certain reality is not in itself the object but rather the experience we have of that object. Personally I only try to establish a possible link between these evidences hoping for a positive interaction because art could become a powerful and selective reconstruction of meaning.

Q: In your recent works, you reflect on transparency and faith. What pushed you to bring those themes together?

A: It happens that we are pilgrims, wherever we choose to live or dwell. Fickle, melancholic, rambling and unaware foreigners, perhaps, because we lack a solid exercise of humility. We are an unhappy disorder of beliefs, faiths, addresses, homelands and destinies, practically a collage, an aggregate of missed solutions to which we often do not know how to add any nuance, subtlety or tonal sensitivity regarding the existential parameter. How much scarcity and how much torment in this profound disorientation of living. Vagabonds and not adventurers, discontinuous in the itinerary, dangling and fragmented, practically only unlikely earthlings.

This is the description of transparency. Faith, for those who wish, can be united or decide not to surrender to this presumed "courage".

These themes are intertwined by their intrinsic nature. This vulgar society exists, simply, because there is a lot of habituation but above all because, in this silo of coarse customs, there is no longer the ability to distinguish basic principles and therefore transparency is also rejected. Excessive tolerance often becomes internal acceptance and consequent loss of critical sense, or a sort of desensitization that no longer allows one to perceive the assimilation of the unaware, so magic becomes only the fulfillment of an ambition, religion turns into the path for the stipulation of a desire and social networks define the embarrassing itinerary of a desire as an end in itself. Ultimately, rather than making these worlds meet, I highlight them in applicative impulses and reflect on this eventuality. Just as I reflect on that hinge that connects faith and spirituality so much so as to consider faith as a useful principle for those who hope not to go to hell while spirituality seems suitable for those who have already been to hell. Perhaps this reflection can also be assimilated to a concept of transparency but I do not pretend to be right because such a claim would be the natural vocation to madness.

Observe the Faith or Look at the Faith - Digital, 2025

Q: Your projects often balance visual form with philosophical thought. How do you know when one starts to lead the other?

A: I begin by saying that every society has its exorcisms and its communicative prerogatives. Primitive society had masks, bourgeois society conveyed mirrors, ours communicates images. In the context of the visual concept, the image is the spatial and temporal intermediation between the true and the false, and neither of the two attributions can assert itself as an obliterated reality. In fact, true or false are realities of the spirit, and as such the image, almost by a transitive property, also highlights itself as a metaphysical visual tautology or, if you like, meta-visual. The image, the visual, in a broad sense, is the transposition of the myth, it is the modeling of hope, the hope that the message of this image will shape and transmute us, and therefore become a sort of form-connotation that proposes a passport to oblivion. From this we can probably intuit why we love images so much and the consequent beauty they offer. 

And in this sense, free beauty is more pertinent to an artistic concept, while adherent beauty is more associated with a philosophical concept of objectification. In the context of more philosophical thought, contemporary thought has become, to use a functional parallel, like the difference between fashion and design. 

The former is restless and hasty, with no time to waste, lacking long-term reflection, with provocative, deafening, hysterical attitudes. Design, on the other hand, is the best affirmation of durability because it must not amaze but convince. Attraction occurs through an inspired intelligence that is fundamental to the fulcrum of reflection. There are those who choose the immortal aspiration without remuneration and without propaganda of notoriety, and those who instead choose the ticket of incorrect superficiality, of ephemeral seduction, of rented applause.

In essence, I tried to hybridize these parameters so that one criterion would flow into the other, that is, a philosophical form and a visual thought but without the need to provide an account that would guide or connote the context more. The tendency is to create a fluidity capable of defining the hypothetical balance in a harmonious way and without excessive rationalizations.

Q: "Observe the faith or look at the faith?" feels like a deeply personal prompt. Was there a moment that sparked that reflection?

A: It does not represent a starting point, nor a personal invitation, but only a timely reflection, even if apparently provocative, because I am an atheist by vocation or, possibly, a differently faithful. I am not a supporter of liturgical or theosophical accounts, but I like to investigate the transformations and facets inherent in the human personality that in the religious path have found, or hoped to find, a sense of reality.

I am allergic to the paths of sanctity, of divinities that sympathize with a partiality substantially without evidence, as suggested by every type of religion. Any fundamentalism, any dogma, any fanaticism represents the profound invitation to an intellectual suicide. 

The individual remains, however, by his nature, a being fond of religion, not so much because he is familiar and masterful with the theories or with the awareness of theological reflections, but for the exact opposite.

The human being, since he does not possess the "safe" answers to his failed spiritual reflections, which are therefore not very effective in building a meaning, becomes a "social beggar" dedicated to the emancipation of sins and guilt and carries out this mutation through religious delegation or hope for intercession. If instead he mastered these settings of thought, he would probably experience the divine entity as intrusive, inappropriate and perhaps even superfluous.

The "spirit of faith" becomes an allergenic, a contaminant precisely by virtue of the absence and the ability to provide adequate answers, full of substance as well as congruent theological reflections. The point of view is distorted and, in the absence of knowledge, illusionism becomes magic. Ultimately, it is precisely the essence of the lack that makes every human action or need transversal.

Faith appears to be a sort of behavioral grammar that tends not to evolve its own path and the rites are an archaic testimony of this that is still present and rooted. In fact, we always face dramas in a somewhat ridiculous way rather than allying ourselves with a true critical sense that truly makes us better. I believe that intelligence, in order to give joy and support, must sometimes also be a little indolent, must avoid that catalog of paths that do not calm and do not lighten anything except the ability to access oneself in an adult way.

These evaluations of thought, although always present within my internal and intellectual debate, have however re-emerged in a preponderant manner in the days of the conclave for the election of the new pope.

 In fact, seeing cardinals, priests and figures in any case linked to the liturgical apparatus, who made videos with their smartphones on TV, triggered this consideration because if there is a clear difference between the term observe (deep understanding and evaluation) and look (superficial act of seeing) I had the impression that this important connotation had been lost since many looked superficially without any need to internalize the event.

Therefore I can conclude (even if the topic would deserve an essay) that beyond faith, our presence, for the world, is unconscious precisely because when this world ends and becomes something else, but not in a religious sense but rather in an astrophysical, astronomical sense, our presence will perhaps have been useless or in any case not so significant. It will only be a piece of egoistic universal fragmentation of which there will no longer be any memory, trace, meaning. Many theologians, philosophers, and religious people are trying to tell us the exact opposite, but unfortunately the path is inescapable and the signs of this itinerary cannot be refuted.

The desperate attempt to convince others, but above all ourselves, that this thought does not represent a hypothesis to be trusted, becomes a personal condition of delegation towards hope. Unfortunately, hope has never saved anyone, much less has it made our little human history evolve. We are a microscopic scientific obstacle in an enormous path that sees us as losers and without influence. We are a suspense of our artificial instantaneity, a denial of nature, a relational insignificance, a micro-fascination destined for perpetual oblivion. The rest are just hypotheses, chatter, pretexts and disappointing incarnation.

Obviously someone, who glimpses a sort of hidden nihilism, will wonder why opt for actions if everything is useless. Pragmatically because something must be done and philosophically because if in our path we identify a shred of ethics, even if superfluous for someone, we must respect it. In short, it is a way to place ourselves and not feel lost in a void devoid of attributions and objectives. However, I have understood and internalized that there is no "nothing completely useless", rather there is the different contextualization of a direct interaction as well as an implicit, but not vain, effort in determining a progression, at least as far as our albeit miserable evolution is concerned. The relevant question boils down to having deeply sedimented and assimilated the concept of Awareness.

Poluplokos - Digital, 2025

Q: You write about aesthetic resistance—what kind of resistance do you try to hold onto in your visual work?

A: Aesthetic resistance is a form of disobedience from that assent towards the conscience of everyday life. And in this path it is necessary to cleanse and face collective wisdom through a restless gaze that deciphers the enigmas and hieroglyphics of a tireless concept of life. It must speak of order but also of disorder, both of which inevitably afflict human time, also highlighting the moss that grows on the lips of indifference, healing the wounds of decomposition and injustice as well as facing those social tunnels paved with tragedies.

Aesthetic resistance must coagulate this visual and interior optimism through the ethical component because, as I always repeat, the word ethics is also contained in the term aesthetics.

However, ethics does not follow subjectivity because it is subjectivity that is ethical, when it exists. 

There is a sort of intrinsic morality, ethical and aesthetic, in being relevant to this model, almost a sort of molecular code to duty, although obviously, "cancer cells" could always emerge willing to contravene and inhibit this identification code.

Aesthetic resistance is a search for happiness albeit watered down by a disordered transience devoid of solid margins and certainties so much so that the past becomes irrevocable, the future is uncertain and the present never satisfies.

Aesthetic resistance is also the patient rustling of an imaginary that does not want to be influenced except by connotations that can extrapolate urgencies and sensibilities of solid evolutionary excellence. The true crime of man is in fact having set up a society sunk in a delirious exhibitionism supported by a declared banality and his doing nothing to get out of it. Man is a drug addict of banality. 

Banality and cultural deficiency are the methadone of his intellectual activity. 

Banality is the never-stopped extermination of human beings by contemporary society and for this reason an aesthetic "resistance" is also necessary.

Q: Does the act of writing help you clarify the work, or does it raise more questions?

A: Often literature has not collaborated with relevance and existentialism, making itself incompatible with the biography of events. Thus literature, writing (even if obviously writing does not immediately have the concept of literature at its disposal...) has obeyed its almost oracular story, living in a circumscribed cave.

My intent is to produce an artifice that can reveal itself between correspondences and articulations, making the concept of language plausible. Certainly doubts are raised, provocations are unleashed, but this dynamic must also offer a sense of challenge and not just the illusion of a path. Writing does not only concern the sorting of words, allocation of terms, syntactic revisitations, reaffirmations of words, but is a sort of compass thrown between two points, suitable for producing a pressing gratitude or perhaps even a constructive and disinterested expressiveness. Syntax is not an elaborate work that screams with intentions or perhaps a disjointed and annoying lexicon or perhaps ephemeral verbal pyrotechnics but is instead the circumnavigation of a concreteness that brings its existence as a gift.

Culture and writing, which assumes its communicative evidence, is the partial and progressive stratification of those disinterested human manifestations that provide credibility to thought without however claiming any coercion so as to prevent the degeneration of thought itself. Since thought remains the mold of words and from them spring the concepts useful for manifesting a transition, this incubator of reflections contributes to the transposition or transfer of concepts between the sphere of writing and that of creativity.