Paolo Cirio - Conceptual artist, 1979. Italy - New-York, U.S.A Paolo Cirio works with the legal, economic, and cultural systems of the information society. He investigates social fields impacted by the Internet, such as privacy, democracy, finance, and intellectual property. He shows his research and intervention-based works through artifacts, photos, installations, videos, and public art.

Cirio’s art considers how society is affected by the control over information. It embodies the conflicts, contradictions, ethics, limits, and potentials inherent in the social complexity of information society through a critical and proactive approach.

His techniques of exposure, appropriation, and recontextualization of sensitive information stimulate ways of seeing, understanding, and challenging contemporary complex issues. Cirio uses popular language, irony, interventions, and seductive visuals to engage a wide public in works of art. His works often make contradictions apparent, expose mechanisms, and dispute their processes in order to debunk perceptions of social, technological, and cognitive systems.

Paolo Cirio’s artworks are often active agents - they elicit reactions from the subjects of the works and participation from the audience. The interactions and processes from his interventions generate online art performances. These socially engaged performances involve the public in critical debates for change driven directly by his artistic concepts and creations, which often embody personal risks and challenges.

His artistic research strives to expand contemporary art into unconventional practices, content, and public. His aesthetic investigations are highly conceptual with layered and interconnected meanings, functions, and agents presented as a whole closed referential system of interrelated ideas and actions.

Paolo Cirio’s art installations translate the gathering, processing, and dissemination of sensitive information into visual forms for the exhibition setting. Within the space of an art exhibition, Cirio’s work shows and documents multilayered concepts, public art interventions, or ethereal time-based online performances. With prints, videos, and custom artifacts, the installations crystallize ideas, reactions, and contexts of the works taken from their original setting to a formal mode of presentation.

Cirio’s art condenses critiques of information systems and dynamics into archival artifacts to visually document and illustrate social structures and aesthetic relations of his work. Cirio’s installation art combines images, photographs, diagrams, documents, artifacts, and videos to engage the general audience in experiencing and discovering the subjects, outcomes, and significance of his interventions and concepts.

Paolo Cirio is a visiting artist and teacher at Le Fresnoy in the framework of its partnerships with La Condition Publique in Roubaix, in relation to its Nex Generation Project, and with Next Generation(s) and the Institut pour la Photographie.

Paolo Cirio