Conceptual Poop Art, 150 opere in mostra di Giorgio De Cesario

“Conceptual Poop Art,” the new exhibition by Giorgio De Cesario curated by Emmanuel Mons delle Roche, aims to be essentially an aesthetic provocation against the paradoxes of the contemporary art market. At the same time, it represents a journey through his 150 artworks and his characters with clay faces in relief on the canvas. Furthermore, for the first time, his studies for creating ties that replicate details of famous artworks are on display to the public. Honored guests will include representatives from the Italian and international textile industry and tie manufacturers.

The exhibition will be held at the artist’s permanent gallery located in La Casa degli Artisti in Gallipoli at 1 Lepanto Street. It will be open to the public daily from August 2 to October 30, 2025, from 6 PM to 8 PM. Admission is free.

“Conceptual Poop Art” by Giorgio De Cesario

An aesthetic provocation against the paradoxes of the contemporary art market

Known for his polychromatic and strongly identity-driven artworks, Giorgio De Cesario—a Salento artist and architect—has always managed to combine tradition and innovation, matter and symbolism. His iconic feminine faces in clay embedded on canvas and adorned with real earrings speak of a vibrant, sensual art rooted in the territory yet open to social and cultural criticism.

With his new work “Conceptual Poop Art,” De Cesario forcefully enters the debate on the authenticity and value of contemporary art, presenting an openly caustic critique of the now-famous “Comedian” by Maurizio Cattelan—the banana duct-taped to the wall that went viral globally. Cattelan’s conceptual stunt captured global attention: sold by Sotheby’s New York for $6.2 million to collector Justin Sun, the banana was eventually eaten by the purchaser himself, symbolically (and physically) becoming human waste. It is from this extreme—and for many, ridiculous—gesture that De Cesario’s response takes shape.

The Artwork
“Conceptual Poop Art” emerges as a critical examination of the excrement from that banana, which became a symbol of an increasingly self-referential and grotesque art market. De Cesario takes what remains—or rather, what it results in—and transforms it into real, concrete, visible, and visitable art. With irony and clarity, the master from Salento upends Cattelan’s provocation and returns it to the public as a reflection on cultural decay and the absurdity of speculative valuations in the art world.

The Venue and Exhibition
The work is permanently displayed at La Casa degli Artisti in Gallipoli, the artist’s gallery, which has been a landmark for contemporary art in Salento for years. Admission is free, and the piece is available for viewing every day from 6 PM to 8 PM, offering the public not just a provocative work but also the opportunity to engage with critical thought that delves into the deepest meaning of “creating art” today.

The Critical Context

De Cesario is not just any outsider. His work has been analyzed and appreciated by some of the most prominent Italian art critics, including Philippe Daverio, Giorgio Di Genova, Luciano Caramel, and Federico Zeri. His creations go beyond aesthetics, becoming a social narrative, visual anthropology, and political denunciation. “Conceptual Poop Art” fits into this trajectory: a piece that is both object, gesture, and message.

Maria Cristina Maritati
La Casa degli Artisti Artist’s Residence

MASKS, FEELINGS, AND COLOR OF GIORGIO DE CESARIO
by Emmanuel Mons delle Roche

Happiness is not evident, it seems Giorgio De Cesario wants to say. The characters are white amidst very beautiful chromatic harmonies. Moreover, they are shaped as if they wear masks, yet even these cannot hide their unrest, their struggle to live.
They are white (without colors, or of all colors?) in a richly colored universe, perhaps because the artist leaves the viewer the freedom to choose their own color; moreover, their appearance dissociates these beings from reality: they are not capable of understanding it and fabricate a mask (which doesn’t hide their feelings, I repeat). Maybe their spirit (dissociated from the body and external reality, which explains these long necks) is of a nature different from “tangible” reality.
I believe all this is present in De Cesario's work. Only his self-portrait is different: he is merely white and “objective”; the others are black: thus, they are the perfect unknown. But perhaps I am wrong about his intentions. The freedom his art grants equally implies the freedom to be mistaken. Yet I am nonetheless captivated.

GIORGIO DE CESARIO AND HIS INNOVATIVE TECHNIQUE OF CLAY ON CANVAS
By Giorgio Di Genova Art Critic and Historian

In the landscape of contemporary Italian art, Giorgio De Cesario stands out as a true experimenter of the visual, capable of combining plastic matter with the two-dimensionality of painting in a bold and deeply personal synthesis. His pictorial-sculptural works, explosions of color on often unconventional supports, reveal an attitude we might define as neo-baroque, where excess becomes language and theatricality becomes content. De Cesario’s technical invention—the integration of faces modeled in clay directly on the canvas surface—represents a break from the traditional boundaries of painting and sculpture.
It is a solution that crosses canonical categories, placing itself within a dimension of total art, where bodily material dialogues with chromatic material in continual tension. His faces emerge from the surface like hieratic apparitions, contemporary icons suspended between sacred and profane, between the human and the mythical. The vivid and striking colors, spread on experimental backgrounds—sands, raw fabrics, reflective materials—give his compositions an almost hypnotic visual strength. The color scheme is never decorative but always structural, conceived as an emotional and psychological vehicle.

His canvases impose themselves on the gaze as ritual apparitions, where the tactile presence of sculpture meets the optical vibration of color. In an age where art often leans towards digital abstraction or the sterile repetition of post-conceptual formulas, De Cesario chooses the more difficult path: that of living matter, of craftsmanship that gets its hands dirty with earth and color. His works remind us that contemporaneity can still pass through masterful craftsmanship, through formal research that roots itself in Mediterranean tradition but looks courageously to the future.

Giorgio De Cesario not only proposes a recognizable visual poetics but signs, with his innovative technique of clay faces on canvas, one of the most original and coherent linguistic operations in Italian art of recent decades.