Long Story Short

In a future still to be written and already corroded, Alessandro Di Pietro constructs a visual language that acts as a grammar of the world: a system where objects, signs, and characters intertwine to shape unstable and fragmented narrative universes. For the exhibition Long Story Short, Di Pietro presents a new installation that continues his extended research on fictional universes as sculptural methodologies. A choreographer of narrative, he layers linguistic ruins, retro-futuristic residues, and pseudo-technical signage in works that function as non-objective technologies—devices meant more to evoke than to display. The works are a kind of process initiated during his residency at Gasworks, London, and represent a continuity that interfaces with the parallel exhibition at the Zazà space. The work presented at Flip, TOMTOM (YellowWhite) T (dry), is a previously unseen triptych composed of painted, printed, and layered surfaces that evoke the aesthetics of digital interfaces, forensic evidence, or tactical maps. In these works, figures emerge like specters beneath colored films or yellowish membranes. Words surface like corrupted data or urgent inscriptions, embedded in surfaces that seem at once archival and organic. In Di Pietro’s practice—often developed in episodic chapters and world-building strategies—the exhibition takes shape not so much as a display, but as a narrative checkpoint. Long Story Short is a title, but also a coordinate—a latent scene, like a geotagged location in a logic known only to the artist and those who choose to follow the signals. The exhibition continues the artist’s investigations into “plausible monsters” and worlds of collapsed grammars, at the intersection of language, design, and sculpture. The work at Flip appears dry, yet what it contains is a vapor of time: something once wet, now encrypted.