Alessandra Pierelli

Alessandra Pierelli reinterprets pop symbols and consumer objects through three-dimensional sculptures that combine aesthetics and social criticism. The artist looks at the imaginary world of comics, sweets and popular culture with a playful and amused spirit, while also embracing profound themes and provoking reflection with a pop-conceptual attitude. With the Dolcemente Pungente series, Pierelli transforms hearts, sweets and chocolates into visual icons that play on ambiguity, using drawing pins, resin and polystyrene to create works that oscillate between apparent lightness and a deeper emotional tension. As the artist herself explains, the drawing pin is “double-sided”: colourful and playful on the surface but sharp and penetrating underneath, symbolising the vulnerability that hides behind playful facades.

In her works, she often explores the theme of “pop food”, imbuing objects related to the world of food with meaning, from the aesthetics of desserts to the emotional imagery associated with them. Through enlargements and transformations, Pierelli elevates these objects to monumental symbols of consumerism, in a dialogue between tradition and innovation that recalls the iconic imagery of pop art. However, her approach introduces a subtle level of irony: the sweets, sculpted in resin and decorated with coloured pins as if they were delicious Smarties, hide their metallic and pointed nature beneath the surface, representing hidden scars and wounds. Other subjects of his colourful works are superheroes and symbols of mass culture, always reinterpreted in a playful, fantastical, colourful and pop key. Art critic Angelo Crespi, director of the Brera Academy and the Cenacolo Vinciano, describes Pierelli as an artist capable of reworking and subverting “pop food” with pataphysical irony, using familiar materials which, when taken out of context, reveal a new aesthetic and conceptual function. Her work, in fact, straddles the boundary between the real and the illusory: the public is invited to question the deeper meaning of these forms, which are only apparently joyful. The artist plays with the viewer's perception, creating a balance between pop aesthetics and an acute reflection on the fragility and contradictions of the contemporary world.