About
Luciano Chessa is an audiovisual and performance artist.
His work includes assemblage, graphic scoring, painting, opera, sculpture and several other media. His works include ‘A Heavenly Act’, an opera-installation commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ‘Piombo’, a work for 2bows cello written for Frances-Marie Uitti and commissioned by NYC’s MAGAZZINO Italian Art, and ‘Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago’, a 60-hours opera-installation on fasting commissioned by the Festival TRANSART and MUSEION, Bolzano’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Chessa has been commissioned multiple times by the Performa Biennial, and in 2014 he presented three events at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibit ‘Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe’. Chessa’s work appeared more than once in Artforum, Flash Art, Art in America, and Frieze, and has been featured in the Italian issue of Marie Claire and in the September Issue of Vogue Italia, and is found in private and museum collections in the United States and Europe. He has collaborated with artists of the likes of Mike Kelley, Kalup Linzy, Michael Tavioni, Ugo Rondinone, Tarik Kiswanson, Chris Newman, Jacopo Benassi, the collective Canemorto and Terry Berlier; presented his works in such museums as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, SFMOMA, MONA in Tasmania, and the MART in Rovereto; and has been artist in residence at CivitellaRanieri, Lucas Artists Residency in Villa Montalvo, the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Djerassi Residency Artist Program, the Harrison House in Joshua Tree, and Tavioni Art Gallery and Vanganga in Avarua, Rarotonga (Cook Islands).
Between September 2023 and October 2024 Chessa was artist in residence at Monaco’s Direction des Affairs Culturelles to create “Monaco Mobile”, a new installation for artmonte-carlo (July 2024) and “Monaco Veloce”, a new performance produced by the Théâtre Princesse Grace in collaboration with the Automobile Club de Monaco, the Pavillion Bosio, and the Médiathèque de Monaco (September 2024). In Il Corriere della Sera, Francesca Pini praised “Monaco Mobile” as a “installation that acts as a sort of mantra”, with its “intricate design of vibrating ropes and iridescent lights”.
Chessa is also an historian specializing in 20th-century Italian art. He is the author of ‘Luigi Russolo Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult’ (2012), the first book dedicated to Russolo shift from Painting to his ‘Art of Noise’. In 2009, his Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (OFNI) was hailed by Roberta Smith in the New York Times as one of the best art events of the year; Chessa has presented this project across the USA and internationally to sold out houses including Rockefeller Center in New York, RedCat in Los Angeles, the New World Center in Miami, Radial System / Maerzmusik-Berliner Festspiele, the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, and Lisbon’s Municipal Theater. With this project he collaborated with the likes of Joan La Barbara, Mike Patton, Lee Ranaldo, Ellen Fullman, Blixa Bargeld, Pauline Oliveros, among others.
He has been interviewed twice by the British Broadcast Corporation, and has been the subject of two short documentaries: one produced by RAI World (2014), and the other by Vietnamese State TV VTV1 in the occasion of his first trip to Viet Nam (2015). Chessa has been published by Rai Trade, Carrara, and Neue Musik Verlag, and has been released by Destination X, Sub Rosa, Stradivarius, Skank Bloc, Hat Hut, Sanatorium of Sound. “Lands End,” a record of his solo piano music also performed by pianist Claudio Sanna is forthcoming on the Austrian label ColLegno.
In the Winter 2018, while in residency at the Steel House in Rockland, ME to develop the audiovisual installation #00FF00 #FF00FF, he prepared the diplomatic edition of Julius Eastman's Symphony No. II, the world premiere of which he conducted at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. The New York Times described Chessa’s rendition as a work that “radiates Cosmic Grandeur”. His edition of this work has been presenteed by The New York Philharmonics, The Cleveland Orchestra, and by the London Symphony Orchestra in the context of the BBC Proms in Royal Albert Hall.