/ Enrico T. De Paris

Enrico Tomasso De Paris (1960) is a well-established Italian multi-media artist living and working in Turin. He was one of the most exciting artists to emerge from the Turin artistic scene in the 1990s, as he was seen as rather a contradictory, stand-alone artist locally and nationally. Since the beginning of the 20th century, he has increasingly been creating more complex installations and has become recognised as innovative because he is constantly experimenting with his artistic practice. He has participated in many personal and group exhibitions and art fairs nationally and internationally. De Paris has strong links with American-Italian artist Victor Kastelic (1964), in whose gallery Kspaces his work was included in many collective shows: Libri d'artista (2017), Black and White Nights (2018), The Store (2018), The Greatest Things/Le cose migliori (2018), Foreshadows/Prefigurazioni (2019) and Strange Days (2021).

De Paris's trademark as an artist is a whirlpool of diverse and expressive visual languages, ranging from painting and drawing to installations, from video to digital images. His artworks are personal statements of his vision of the world. A "total work of art" – a multi-material assemblage of sound and light and various daily objects in different industrial materials such as glass, plastic and steel, found in his environment, let alone the use of traditional art mediums such as acrylic paints and pencils. His artworks evoke the disorder in search of a new dimension. What does the future have in store for humanity? De Paris has an answer: he creates the next world contaminated by biotechnologies and by the uncontrollable power that multinational chemical-pharmaceutical and agro-food corporations have on society. Whether small or larger in scale, in many cases site-specific installations, his artworks serve as metaphors for premonition, a glimpse into the future as a prewarning to the viewer as to what is to become next due to never-stopping too-fast-evolving technological advancements. These artworks are a product of the artist's creative processes engaging with his understanding of and his concern for the negative impact on humanity in a new historical era. Humanity is at a crucial point in time and place, in which the manipulative abilities of humans on their own bodies and on others, as well as on nature, via genetic modification of DNA, have almost become accepted as a normal process of the human condition within the framework of accelerating cultural evolution, despite still many controversies concerning ethics. He calls his series of projects "Chromosoma", "Mutations" and "We Are Transhuman."

I’m interested in our present-day way of living. I describe the world that is continually expanding and rapidly changing before our very eyes. It is an attempt to adapt my psyche and soul to the transformations that social migrations, technology and bio-technologies are making to our everyday life and to the way mankind shapes the future.
– Cited from Jean-Claude Oberto (ed). In Enrico T. De Paris: On Air (Turin: Umberto Allemandi & C. Spa, 2013). © Enrico Tommaso De Paris/Umberto Allemandi & C. Spa