30/04/2026
HIERARCHY OF GENRES Alessandro Calabrese
April 2026
21 × 29,7 cm
64 Pages printed on Single Coated paper
Softcover Staples Binding
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Designed by Tommaso Tanini
Typeface by Giulia Zanzarella
Text by Milovan Farronato and Chiara Spagnol
Hierarchy of Genres originates from a mistake: printing on the wrong side of glossy photographic paper. Unable to pe*****te the surface, the ink remains suspended in an unstable state; before it changes, coagulates, or disappears, the print is photographed again. What first appeared as an accident gradually became a method, allowing Calabrese to explore the threshold between photography and painting, figuration and abstraction, control and loss of control.
The project takes as its point of departure the six traditional categories of pictorial genres — History Painting, Portrait Painting, Genre Painting, Landscape and Cityscape Painting, Animal Painting, and Still Life — a hierarchy central to Western painting until the advent of photography. Returning to this pre-photographic system through photographic means, Calabrese creates a conceptual correspondence with the formal process of the work itself: photography approaches painting, while a technical error turns the photographic surface into matter.
For each category, he draws on a different source: material related to the events of September 11, 2001; selfies of friends and colleagues exchanged in private chats; screenshots of embraces from films and television series; early landscapes shot on film at the beginning of his career; genetically flawed animals from natural history museum archives; and flowers photographed during and after the pandemic. The book presents a series of specimens for each genre, alongside a number of abstract works generated by the overlap of sheets, whose still-wet surfaces leave traces on the untouched, correct side of the paper. It also includes a text written jointly by Milovan Farronato and Chiara Spagnol on the occasion of Calabrese’s solo exhibition at Viasaterna at the end of 2024.
