Artist Statement
Lupiani, influenced heavily by the 70’s popular culture of his youth, often relates to his art practice based on the Kansas song, “Dust in the Wind.” It’s hard for him to fathom a restrictive “one lane” approach to making art as a tiny passenger hurtling in the vastness of an ever expanding universe. Lupiani contemplates the very nature of his existence on a daily basis and wonders out loud, “Am I really here?”
The internet has kept Lupiani connected to the artists, family, and friends he considers active and/or passive collaborators. Likewise, the meta-verse provides him with a fertile platform to experience images that he is drawn too, past and present. He focuses on making art that connects his daily lived experience by relentlessly pursuing a buoyant set of basic criteria to make art. These criteria range from the use of the hand drawn line, to a basic philosophy of color, to the daily questioning, “what comes after space/time?”
The inherent conflict between Lupiani's analog rich upbringing and the ensuing collision of a digital age, think Atari, circa. 1977, and now the influences of Web2 and Web3, have afforded Lupiani a sustained creative license to mash up his past visual experiences to the present.
He has always been connected to text as it is one of the first ways he experienced his own creativity by rendering boxed letters of his name with a rainbow as a backdrop on his bedroom door. From there, Lupiani has always been infatuated with text and images, whether it be by finding old Playboy magazines in the attic as a kid, looking through hot rod magazines, or reading comic books. He utilizes text in his work to timestamp and catalogue life events. Examples include the last names of recently deceased artists, actors, and politicians to the creation of nine letter puns and play on words which reference Lupiani’s daily thoughts.
Additionally, Lupiani has always been a student of painting history and more recently, French masters from 1600 AD all the way to Matisse in the twentieth century. Fragonard, Boucher, Courbet, Watteau, Cézanne, and Matisse are just of few artists that Lupiani has been de-constructing as of late.
This interest in French painting has been accelerated by a recent discovery via 23andMe that Lupiani’s ancestral past has ties to the French aristocracy of the 1800’s and not the Italian lineage that his last name implies. These technological advances in DNA tracing captivate Lupiani and help him to navigate his personal history in relation to his artistic voice.