Grid of multicolored rectangles (2023) Digital Arts by Jean Paul Pierozzi

Jean Paul Pierozzi is a photographer who also practices digital art and collage. In 2015 a serious illness abruptly put an end to his teaching career. Hospitalized for acute myeloid leukemia, he stayed more than six months cloistered in a sterile room before undergoing the bone marrow transplant that saved him. Forced to stay in bed, with his computer as his only companion, he began to draw landscapes, people, then shapes in bold and lively colors using his Photoshop software. That's all he had left to do, so what was a pleasant moment of leisure and relaxation after his school hours became by force of circumstance his main occupation.

When he left the hospital in December of the same year, he found himself with twenty suffering but vivid images, like the ordeal he had just experienced. And overcome. The idea came to him to illustrate the twelve months to come as a sign of optimism, at the same time to keep a tangible trace of these painful months. The calendar for the year 2016 that thus emerged was like the emblematic memorandum of his sufferings, his fears and the small hope that kept him alive. For him who is a believer, it was a kind of thanksgiving. He sends a copy to the anonymous young man who donated his bone marrow to him and to the doctors at the hospitals of Rimini and Bologna. He could have left it there.

If he continued, it was because he realized afterwards that this artistic schedule was the only dimension in which he still dared to project himself, the only future that did not worry him: the image started, worked on, completed in a reasonable time gave meaning to its suspended existence. Also his images are crumbs of this lost time, the one that passes, the one that he feels pass in his flesh, having more than any other the presentiment of its duration, of the days, the months, the years which are counted to him. . As for his artistic approach, he likes to believe that it is a hermeneutics by virtue of which, and paradoxically, the image says what the words do not show, his works being either an invitation to speak, or the expression of a transfiguration of reality as it appeared to him as the image was created on his computer screen.

• Nationality: ITALY
• Date of birth : 1953
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Italian Artists