"Thomas - Yates, Hastings 1928" by Simone Domeniconi.

Technique: Chess collage, polyurethane, enamels and acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 40 x 50 cm
Year: 2016

The title of the work refers to the chess game played in 1928 in Hastings between Sir George Alan Thomas and Frederick Yates.

Born in Carpi in 1972, Simone Domeniconi is an Italian artist. Domeniconi reconstructs a precise move of a chess game, really played by the great champions of all time, inserting it into images, icons of the history of art, maps, playing cards, crosswords, constellations, and much more, by gluing chess pieces directly onto the canvas. If you were to summarize his work in a nutshell it can be defined as aesthetic, conceptual and historical / geopolitical.

Chess is highly unpredictable. This is the first lesson that transpires from Domeniconi's works, because it is precisely unpredictability that is the characteristic of his expressive language that condenses multiple narrative and stylistic registers. Domeniconi first studies the entire course of the games in which the greats have challenged each other. From this vision he identifies and extrapolates the moment in which the arrangement of the pieces on the board can be read as a symbolic image of a certain historical moment or context.

Domeniconi probably enjoys himself because he plays with history, with fighting heroes, from heroes of art right up to comic superheroes. Domeniconi often plays, but he doesn't joke. Although in a certain sense Domeniconi's art should be meditated upon - in the sense that his are often cultured references, the result of a passionate study process - his are not conceptual works. Just like chess is not a brain game.