THE RAW CODE

THE RAW CODE is a work as large as the gallery that hosts it, Spazio E_EMME. It’s a mixed media mosaic of photographs and colors, reworked on a computer, and printed on PVC.

Andrea Colombu’s artistic work has always explored dramatically ironic themes: a face distributed across the risers of a staircase (EXMA Cagliari 2018), the image of a mechanical or animal subject obsessively repeated on different scales until it loses its identity (meccanoformismi 2019), paper towers resembling blind eyes, made from rolls of calculator paper tied in self-locking bands like 19th-century women’s corsets (Forme del tempo 2019), and much more in his production of drawings, photography, and computer graphics. These works, which have been part of the OVER GAME cycle since 2020, continue today with THE RAW CODE, a carpet as large as the gallery that hosts it, Spazio E_EMME. The work features, against a completely absorbent black background, many individual human characters, differentiated by their eyes or mouths, positions in which everyday objects appear: food, gears, toys. A large pincaro (1) to be crossed by hopping, on one foot, two feet, or no hopping at all, just regular steps with the option of swerving left and right.The only alien presence is some anthracite gray rectangles that completely obscure faces and the black background. 1 Pincaro is a children’s street game, a drawing of numbered squares to be crossed by hopping with one or two feet depending on the square, retrieving a small stone thrown by the player before starting the round. Each foot on the lines or outside the square is subject to a penalty.