Visual Arts - Bachelor of Arts

THREE-YEAR BA PROGRAM IN PAINTING AND VISUAL ARTS

INTRODUCTION

EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY
The training philosophy of the three-year course in Visual Arts wants to take in the transformations characterizing the contemporary artistic practices that have abandoned the disciplinary borders of fine arts in order to acquire a new attitude to the design application and to interact with the different fields of productive and social life.
The course, therefore, aims at training and educating to all the different artistic techniques, to experimentation and to the re-interpretation of the traditional academic approach as well as to the survey of the relations between work and project and between Art and Design. Next to the main training in painting, the course also comprises other different techniques and disciplines: Sculpture, Video-art, Photography and Cinema. Particular attention is paid to Public Art.

DIDACTIC METHODOLOGY
The course envisages theoretical-critical subjects, technical and project teaching connected with each other trying to overcome the classical separation between theoretical and laboratory activities typical of academic education. Students are encouraged to conceive the artistic work in terms of project development through direct facing the social contest, the dynamics and the values of the contemporary art system. Students are guided through the experimentation of a variety of environments, techniques and methods in order to develop an individual way of expressing themselves and a personal artistic path. Starting from an initial introduction to the various forms of visual culture, students face directly and critically the emerging issues of contemporary art.

PROFESSIONAL PROFILES
The course originates from the belief that the role of an artist is becoming more and more similar to that of a professional capable of playing various roles within contemporary aesthetical and social education, thereby carrying out functions that are connected with the world of production and that of communication as well. Besides creative skills, students are also encouraged to develop self-promotion, project and organisation skills in order to have easily access to the professional world.

PROJECTS AND ACTIVITIES
Students have the opportunity to attend conferences of international renowned artists and to participate in projects, exhibitions and events promoted by the academy and its partners. Among these: personal and collective exhibitions at private galleries (Artra Gallery – Milan, Start-Milan, Prometeo Gallery-Milan, Borgovico 33-Como, Studio Dabbeni – Lugano), projects realised in collaboration with institutions and foundations (MIART – Milan, Prague Biennial, Teseco Foundation, Fairplay Lugano, Art for the World-Europe), contests (Premio Nazionale delle Arti – National Prize of the Arts -, Gemine Muse), internships in these and in further institutions.

PROGRAM DIRECTOR

Marco Scotini
He is an art critic and an independent curator. He graduated in Aesthetics, he was a student of C.L.
Ragghianti and member of the Ragghianti Foundation of Lucca from 1996 to 2003. He held
seminars at the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Urbino and at the International University of Art in Florence. As a scholar of Aesthetics he dealt with all the history of
critical studies and artistic historiography appearing with important contributions in many specialised
magazines. Moreover, he dedicated many essays to the history of Art Critical studies and to the
History of Cinema. He collaborates with the magazines Flash Art, Tema Celeste, Arte e Critica, Artelier, Art Moscow Magazine, Espacio, Manifesta Journal.
As a curator he produced the following exhibitions: for Regione Lazio and the Ministry of the
Environment, “Il Giardino di Abeona”, Rome 1997/98, for the Ragghianti Foundation, “Tempo sul
Tempo”, Lucca 1999/2000, for the Marino Marini Museum, “Museo Entr’acte”, Florence 2000, for
Mattoni Water Colours, “A Sense of Wellbing”, Carslbad, Czech Republic 2001, “Beautiful Banners”,
Prague Biennal 1, Prague 2003, “Empowerment” for the Villa Croce Museum, Genoa 2004, “Revolutions Reloaded”, Milan-Berlin-Bucarest 2004, “Produciendo Realidad”, Lucca 2004, “Disobedience”, Berlin, Prague, St. Petersburg, Mexico City, Barcelona 2005-2006, “Acción
Directa”, Prague Biennale 2, Prague 2005. He is curator of the Gianni Colombo Archive in Milano.
Since 1996 he has been member of the Italian Association for Aesthetics Studies.

If you want to have a look at a Visual Arts project, please visit: http://www.theutopiandisplay.com

CURRICULUM

VISUAL ARTS SUBJECTS – I year

ARTISTIC ANATOMY
It deals with the anatomic study of the body and with the body’s main representing models in Art: the body between scientific representation and artistic expression, gestures and expressions, the body in space and in movement. The program also introduces students to the artistic movements of the 20th century, where the body as a subject worked as a model, an inspiring motif or even a support as well as an expressive medium in Photography, Cinema and Video. Students will develop an individual artistic project dealing with the topics learnt and based on an essential bibliography, experimenting the drawing from a living model.

DRAWING
Basic Drawing: This course is structured as a practical lab aiming at leading students towards the acquisition of an effective coordination between the events of the visual process and their graphical translation by stimulating critical thinking on the conventions and norms governing representation. Drawing is used as a “practical organ” of visual intelligence in order to disassemble the acts and times of vision through exercises and experiments and then reassemble them in the graphic rendering. Particular emphasis will be laid on group work, both in the project development and during the discussion of the outcomes. At the end of the course students’ ability to represent a given real object – through a set of signs that has been intentionally and carefully activated – will be examined.

Digital Drawing: The course, common to all schools, allows the acquisition of the theoretical-practical basic notions of the digital graphic representation and of photo-retouch through standard software such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Objective of the course is to provide students with the basic elements for the visualisation and presentation of their projects, in order to progressively create a digital portfolio of their works starting from the first year.

CONTEMPORARY ART PHENOMENA
Visual Culture: Objective of the course is to guide students in the critical analysis of images coming from different disciplines and of the heterogeneous languages that define the contemporary “visual culture” in order to enrich students’ visual and cultural heritage through the discovery of new aesthetics and of an original expressive universe. The program is declined according to the students’ specific teaching needs and comprises visits to exhibitions, conferences and meetings dealing with the relationship between the different languages of artistic expression (Fashion, Photography, Graphic Design, Contemporary Art, Music).

Theory and History of Video-art: The course focuses on the relationships between the avant-gardes of art and cinema and goes into those experiences defined as experimental movies, video-art, micro-cinema and non-fiction. The program is divided into two parts. The first theoretical part is composed of historiographic / analytical lectures dealing with the description of avant-gardes, the evolution of technologies (film, electronic, digital) and the analysis of authors’ different writing types, styles and methods through presentations,
film-projections and discussions.

PHOTOGRAPHY I
Photography: The main character of photography is its specific ability to “capture” all together shapes and movements, spaces and events. Starting from these premises, the course includes teaching, analysis and selection of specific elements of photography techniques; knowledge and in-depth study of photography works as historical models and as part of contemporary imagination; constructing and analysing the photography tools; teaching and thinking about photography as a non-ambiguous language.

Photography techniques: This course aims at providing students with all the necessary skills to use analogical and digital photographic equipment. Both the shooting and the post-production processes will be analysed. Students will start with a study of light in order to subsequently learn how to use an optical bench, digital equipment and finally software devoted to photographic elaboration. Besides fostering the development of specific technical skills, students are encouraged to reflect on the photographic medium, to learn “to see” and “read” the photographic image as it is.

HISTORY OF MODERN ART
The course traces the birth, the institutionalisation and the crisis of the Western representation model that has characterised Art in the modern age. The optical devices, the geometrical outlines, the idea of the square, the relationship between the observer and the image producer, the role of the client and the exhibition place will be the themes dealt with along this historical journey from Giotto to Velázquez up to Courbet, not according to a temporal linear development but in relation to the level of formalization reached by each of the issues treated.
The course proposes a sort of deconstruction “Representation” as a status of the Western modern image.

PAINTING AND VISUAL ARTS I
Design for Painting: This course deals with a project theme that changes every year and that allows students to develop an individual approach and a personal project culture. Through a survey of the external context, the analysis of various artists’ works and the constant interaction with the professor, students are encouraged to experiment and to express a personal imaginary through the use of Painting, Sculpture, Installation, Video and Performance.

Painting: The objective of this course is to highlight, through the different aspects of the painting language, each student’s growth potentiality, combining manual skills and consciousness, knowledge of technical tools and of issues concerning shape, colour, composition and space, meant as an infinite territory of possibilities and not as fixed categories.

PAINTING TECHNIQUES AND TECHNOLOGIES
Painting Techniques: The program goes into the history and the practice of painting and sculptural techniques as well as the supports used by artists along the centuries (graphic techniques, pigments, oil painting, watercolour painting, acrylic and vinyl colours, wooden supports, canvas, papers and glues) offering students a basis for the development of a personal artistic research. The goal of the course is the acquisition of a rich and complete technical-artistic support so that students can develop their own creative research in a conscious and effective way.

Print-making: Research on the concept of publishing and reproducing in contemporary society will be carried out. The course focuses on the creation of a visual dictionary that will be published at the end of the course. All the items included in this dictionary will define a field of study including: printing shapes, formats, essential conditions regulating the publication and reproduction of images up to the analysis of image behaviour in contemporary society.

Illustration: This course is aimed at providing students with the basic drawing methods as an expressive communication tool to develop projects: from the creative phase of drawing sketches up to the visualisation of narrations and of the illustrated image. The applied story-board and lay-out study will foster expressive experimentation leading students to develop their own illustration attitude.

PUBLIC ART
Since the mid 80s the evident objective of Public Art has been to intervene in some infrastructures so that the historical function of a square or of a monument could be re-found with a completely new approach, thus defining a spacial whole as a social whole. Students will deal with survey and intervention projects in which they will have to conjugate in a critical way Architecture and Urban Design, Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture, Visual Communication and Plastic Arts in general.

VISUAL ARTS SUBJECTS – II year

HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY ART I
The course deals with an in-depth analysis of the relationship between Art and environmental space within all the artistic movements of the twentieth century starting from one of the protagonists of such research like Gianni Colombo (Milan, 1937- 1993). Colombo’s overcoming of the bi- or three-dimensional work and the direct involvement of the exhibition space allow to focus on the temporalization of space as well as on the programming and participation of the work of art.
Sectors such as Cinema, Theatre, Design, Video and Architecture will be read in an integrated and historicized framework.

PAINTING AND VISUAL ARTS II
Painting or Design for Painting: Students will be given the opportunity to go more in-depth through one of the two study paths they started the previous year thereby developing more personal research.

Drawing for Painting: The course is a theoretical-practical laboratory entailing and analysing in depth the research that was started during the basic drawing course. Theoretical teachings are structured in thematic units and aim at stimulating “participating observation” strategies of one’s perception attitudes and of their variability and a critical reflection on the role of drawing in contemporary artistic research. Particular emphasis will be laid on team work both in connection with the realisation of projects and with the discussion of results.

VISUAL ARTS TECHNIQUES AND TECHNOLOGIES
Analysis and design of audio spaces: The birth of video-art in the second half of the Sixties’ is strongly connected with the diffusion of video-tapes in the same way as today performing and installation arts are strongly connected with personal computers. Today the link between art and “usable technology” has reached the field of audio-visual new media performances, the production of new audio languages, the construction of narrative devices and liveness. This course intends to foster reflection on the meeting between creative production and technological process in the analysis and design of audio spaces.

Sculpture Material: The “Tropicalia” movement introduced in Brazil in the early Seventies’ a new attitude towards art, society and culture. This cultural movement represents a pretext to adopt a similar approach and mental attitude - characterised by enthusiasm and uncertainty at the same time - during the “Tropical Lessons” course. The course envisages the exploration of various subjects (architecture, music, design, art …) in order to encourage the development of a new plastic and project approach to the sculpture and installation dimension.

VIDEO-INSTALLATION (VIDEO-ART)
Video-art: The course envisages a digital laboratory in which students can experiment and get to know techniques and processes in the field of art audio-visuals and videos.

Shooting techniques: This course is aimed at questioning the surrounding space, audio places and landscapes, individual attitudes and spontaneous groups in order to stimulate a vision in-depth of focus, visionary listening and the materialisation of imagination through the elaboration of specific projects to be concluded by the end of the academic year. The fields and the formats that will be analysed are experimental audio-visual language, short film and audio drama.
The main goals that the course aims to achieve are digital audio-visual techniques alphabetisation and the acquisition of some linguistic elements in order develop a personal expressive use of the video medium. The project is developed step by step alternating film viewing, practical exercises and collective examinations.

Basic Editing: This course has two main goals: the first is providing students with the necessary knowledge of video signals and of non-linear editing platforms taking into account all the issues connected with the post-production of a video. The second goal is based on the analysis of audio-visual language with the aim of taking up a comparative analysis of cinema and video-art language.

AESTHETICS
The course highlights the problems and difficulties concerning the situation of Art and of contemporary Culture. It introduces to the basic notions of the philosophical aesthetics and goes through the present trends in terms of artistic research.
The course is divided into two semesters. In the first semester students will acquire an aesthetic knowledge, from traditional crucial points up to contemporary times, while the second semester is dedicated to the state of research in a period characterised by a cognitive mortification.

SCULPTURE
The course introduces students to some key themes of the contemporary artistic research, starting from the idea of Sculpture meant as a three-dimensional object that takes up a room. From the classic object made with traditional materials and languages to the assembly of more elements coming from different disciplinary fields up to the use of different languages. Research starts from a physical element and, through the development of an idea, it gets to
the management of space. Going through the concept of exploration between men and surrounding universe, the course intends to trace the reading of codes, ways and places that define the contemporary artistic environment.

VISUAL ARTS SUBJECTS – III year

HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY ART II
The course makes an in-depth analysis of the artistic practices of the second half of the Twentieth century focusing on the movements of the past thirty years through the theme of the relationship between Art and society. The theme has not been examined in details by official historians, but it is extremely interesting in relation to the most recent pieces of research globally made from the second half of the 90s.

PAINTING AND VISUAL ARTS IiI
Painting or Design for Painting: Students will conclude the study path they started in the previous years. Their study outcomes are finalised towards the thesis research work and towards the creation of an individual artistic portfolio.

Drawing for Painting: This course completes the experimentation on design and supports the research activities carried out in the various subjects.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
The course provides the study elements concerning the new “ways of living”, i.e. how the recent digital revolution has changed the ways of living our homes and cities. Following the disappearance of the traditional dimensions of public and private, the house becomes a place communicating with the world, while the urban context becomes an “extension of the private”. Students will approach new forms of living: semi-public and semi-private spaces,
relationship-spaces and self-spaces, the new objects of sur-modernity, Marc Augé’s anonymous non-places which, no matter where they are built, have no identity and can be recognised only through linguistic messages and signs. Space, crossed by relationship and communication elements, “desacralizes itself”, i.e. it loses the hierarchic connotations
of the patriarchal symbolic order. Everything mixes together and mirrors itself in the artistic and media languages and practices.

THEORY AND METHODOLOGY OF MASS MEDIA
The course provides students with operating tools needed to understand the phenomenon of Media and to perform an analysis method of the effects of Media and Communication paying particular attention to psychological and social processes. Lessons will deal with the teaching of the “Toronto School of Communication” and will be specifically focused on Marshall McLuhan’s intuition according to which “the Medium is the Message” considering also the economical and social effects. The study of Media leads students to consider how people and institutions are moduled by technologies.

HISTORY OF CINEMA AND VIDEO
The course has the following objectives: 1) an approach to the themes of audiovisual products
in general and of cinema in particular 2) the analysis of the spectator-film relationship in order to make students’ vision of films more critical and effective 3) the knowledge of the cinematographic language and of the technologies underneath cinema 4) the knowledge of the production steps of a movie 5) the analysis of the reading modalities of a script 6) the knowledge of the main movements of the History of Cinema and of the most significant authors.

ILLUSTRATION
This course introduces students to the Illustration world through an overview that goes from a presentation of genres and authors to traditional and digital techniques up to the individuation of a personal style. Besides the traditional techniques (crayons, acrylic, etc.) digital techniques, among which Corel Painter – one of the most widely used software in this sector, will be explored.

URBAN DESIGN
The course is a reading, interpretation and planning experience related to the complexity of the urban reality, in particular with the public space meant as a place of relations and sociality. The course means to show a working method and in particular an approach to the project starting from the observation of the urban “context”, because confronting oneself with its complexity is a fundamental attitude for the design activity in all its applications.

DECORATION
Decoration is something totally different from what is traditionally intended with project as it does not involve any forecast, organisation and use hypothesis. Decoration has “no tasks”, its status consists in presenting itself as communication of sensations, as consumption phenomenon in itself, as a list of personal values. Students will be encouraged to deal with three-dimensional objects as they were painting, looking for pieces of visual thoughts in themselves in order to make decoration and its expressive and poetical vocation living.

Visual Arts BA in Italy