Premio Combat Prize

In this work Andrea Alessio collects, as in an ancient bestiary, a series of animal images. The forest does not frighten modern man anymore. Its sinister night calls no longer stalk the minds of children. Little remains of the supernatural and the wild no longer beckons. It is in this disenchanted world, through which we have roamed far too long, that Andrea Alessio embarks on his journey. A hunt for what remains of the beast; a quest apparently fed by our need for visual evidence. Those eyesare sometimes glassy, elusive or even dead. Our animal instinct has died too, closed in on itself, lost among its artifices, like a wild bear trapped between fake rocks. Andrea AlessioBorn in Venice, 1966.Andrea Alessio lives and works between Treviso and Venice.He studied Literature and Cinema at the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and afterwards continued studying photography with authors like Italo Zannier, Gabriele Basilico, Jessica Backhaus, Guido Guidi, Silvia Camporesi, Joakim Eskildsen, Machiel Botman, Marco Zanta, Todd Hido, Pino Musi, Mark Steinmetz.His work has been exhibited, among others, by the gallery Il Diaframma for its 25th anniversary, by the Contemporary Art Museum in Bergamo and the Science Museum in Milan and more recently by private galleries in New York and San Francisco.Andrea Alessio owns and runs a photographic studio (www.varianti.it).After a pause in his artistic career, he restarted focusing on more personal work in 2011 and met Micamera shortly afterwards.