PROPHETIC VISIONS, curated by Luca Ricci & Pengpeng Wang

​Sgallari Arte is pleased to present Prophetic Visions, a solo exhibition by Damiano Fasso curated by Luca Ricci and Pengpeng Wang. From March 14 to April 4, 2026. Opening Saturday, March 14, at 6:00 PM. Presentation by Luca Ricci

Damiano Fasso's solo exhibition, Prophetic Visions, constructs a visual field suspended between infantile iconography, post-digital symbols, and apocalyptic allegory. In these works, the artist, through a low-fi material language and a simplified figurative grammar, consistently develops a vision of strategic "pseudo-naivety": cartoonish creatures, pixelated aliens, simplified skeletons, astronauts, pills, dinosaur skeletons, symbolized Oriental characters, and social media hashtags combine to form a de-historicized iconic ecosystem. This system refers both to the homogenization of globalized visual culture and to the fragmented condition of the contemporary subject within algorithmic environments and consumer structures. The surface of Fasso's images presents the flatness and decorativeness of children's illustrated books—strong black outlines, uniform color fields, repeated textures. and bright fluorescences — yet this “cuteness” is constantly eroded by signs of latent violence: floating skulls, deities of contamination, gunshots, pill-like bodies, and astronauts in zero gravity place the scene in a tension zone between fairy tale and catastrophe. The astronaut no longer symbolizes exploration, but rather approaches the figure of a suspended patient or an experimental subject, becoming a post-human vector modulated by technological and chemical environments; the skeletonized dinosaurs and pixelated creatures instead appear as relics of a future archaeology, alluding to the toyization and museification of life and history in consumer culture. An iconography of the “soft apocalypse” emerges: the disaster does not manifest itself as a collapse or explosion, but infiltrates everyday life in the form of playful, commodified, and consumable signs. The recurrence of hashtags (#), pixelated video game characters, gestural interface icons, and declarative texts in English (such as art is a digital lie) indicates that the image It no longer represents reality, but the media environment itself. These elements function not as quotations, but rather as the structure of the image, configuring a sort of post-digital popular iconography: the visual motifs no longer derive from natural experience or religious tradition, but from interface culture, video games, and the syntax of social media. In this sense, the “prophecy” is no longer theological revelation, but rather a cultural prediction of the algorithmic age—the future of the visual will be generated by the language of platforms rather than by the experience of the world. In the creative process, Fasso, following his own cultural inclination, inserts Chinese characters and Japanese words (such as “未来の夢,” “故障,” “元素”) into numerous works, which often appear as labels or graphic signs rather than as syntactic text, producing a de-semantized Orientality: the language separates from its cultural context and becomes a sign of global, mobile, and consumable design. These elements simultaneously suggest the semantic shift of culture in the digital age and the condition of a "Downloadable culture" in the global visual market, where writing no longer conveys history but functions as an ornamental unit in an archive of images.
Fasso also introduces significant linguistic deviations in his materials, employing polymers, fluorescent paints, metallic powders, and glitter—industrial media—to produce reflective, synthetic, and depthless surfaces, placing the work somewhere between painting, toys, and signage. This choice is not decorative, but rather constitutes an allegorical use of consumer society materials: glitter and fluorescence here take on the role of a religious "gold leaf" of contemporary secular culture, alluding to the cultic structure of consumerist visuals. The unconventional spelling of the title Prophetic Visions further reinforces this context, suggesting a distorted or dislocated prophecy: in a world governed by technical systems, data culture, and the language of platforms, the future is no longer announced by the oracle, but generated by the circulation of images and the reproduction of signs. Fasso's works thus appear as relics. visuals of a future civilization: both infantile and contaminated, seductive and empty, global and without belonging. They do not represent the future, but rather constitute its symptomatic present image, demonstrating the process through which the human subject is progressively transformed into part of the iconic environment dominated by algorithmic vision, consumer materials, and the overproduction of signs. In this sense, Prophetic visions is not a depiction of the future, but a visual archaeology of the post-digital era: in a reality rewritten by the language of platforms, prophecy no longer refers to a divine revelation, but rather to the destiny of re-coding the human within structures of image and technology.”
(Pengpeng Wang, The Persistence of the Prophetic Image and Post-Digital Allegory)