When it comes to pop culture or the hybridization with the world of show business the name that pops up first is of Andy Warhol. But now his legacy is carried on further by new artists capable of taking up challenges and making themselves known more and more by the general public, thanks to their contribution to the visual arts in multiple sectors. So Francesco Vezzoli, after the cover in April 2019 for Vanity Fair, in which he has tributed the great master Lucio Fontana with a canvas showing the Italian tricolour with a cut in the center, today he amazes the readers with another cover for the French magazine Numéro Art.
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This time Francesco Vezzoli (Brescia, 1971) has succeeded in its intent with a shot - in his style - dedicated to the Italian singer and songwriter Mahmood (pseudonym of Alessandro Mahmoud, Milan, 1992), winner of the Sanremo Festival in 2019 with the song "Soldi". In the photo, the singer is in the act of "emulating" the protagonist of the painting behind him: Robert de Montesquiou, a French intellectual and dandy who lived between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, portrayed by Giovanni Boldini.
In the "Italian" cover, the singer is immortalized by Vezzoli exactly in the same role and pose in which Giovanni Boldini in 1897 portrayed Robert de Montesquiou: a decadent poet and writer born in Paris in 1855 and known for his elegant and eccentric lifestyle, in short, a typical example of what Charles Baudelaire has defined "dandy". In addition to Boldini himself, the esthete frequented other writers and artists belonged to the cultural scene of the time, such as Marcel Proust and Gustave Moreau. For the cover of Numéro art, Vezzoli reinterpreted Boldini's painting by making colorful and shiny tears flow over Robert de Montesquiou's face.
Those same tears that have become suddenly artist's distinctive, especially in portraits and photographs of "VIPS" from the show that the artist has always revisited with irony and critical sense. In this case, Vezzoli gave birth to a double work: his version of the portrait of Robert de Montesquiou and the shot that sees the same portrait as the background for Mahmood who has been playing the role of the French dandy, complete with gloves, stick and outfit fin de siècle. Finally, the sixth issue of Numéro art also has two other covers: the first one is of the now-iconic selfies retouched with Cindy Sherman's Facetune, the second a portrait of the musician Blood Orange (Dev Hynes) signed by the artist Jacolby Satterwhite.