Beauty as a formula, as a programmed paradigm, Disordinary_Beauty aims at re-programming the formula presenting a new idea of beauty, the torn sense of beauty.

As part of Disordinary_Beauty glitch art series collection, this artwork is a special edition created by Dom Barra for his solo gallery show Disordinary_Beauty at Galleria Biffi Arte in Piacenza. The show was produced by Fuori Visioni with the support of the Banca di Piacenza.

In “Disordinary Beauty” Dom Barra offers a summary of his artistic development, as the exhibition collects its main languages and themes. Key-topic of the solo show is the idea of beauty, a subject as deeply rooted in the art tradition as very timely nowadays. Building an anthropological reflection focused on our society, the artist engages the main aesthetic references of our time – especially dwelling with the ones promoted by social media.

The ten artworks, the video, and the Instagram site-specific project composing the show create a journey through the social persona of very well-known influencers, whose features – worshipped and emulated by thousands of followers – are now twisted by the artist's intervention. The pixels composing their canonical and programmed beauty as skin cells are overturned and distorted, altered, reprogrammed, torn to create a new image, strangely composed by the same units and yet completely different. These visages, now made unrecognizable but still somehow familiar, convey an idea of “disordinary beauty” produced by the use of glitch generative scrips. In this reconfigured landscape, the artist invites us to contemplate the frailty and fading nature of the models we as a society are used to admiring, finally proposing a new idea of chaotic, imperfect, and haunting beauty. A celebration of imperfections, the atypical, the wretched, the outsiders, the unknowns. Lost souls in the machine with no identity. They live in our society short circuits and in our toxic paranoiac idea of beauty because beauty is chaos.

The show was curated by Carolina Moncaleano, Mariangela Vitale a Carlotta Biffi. The show was presented in Italy from 5 Nov to 28 Nov.

Dom Barra took part in several curatorial projects and exhibitions. His artworks have been exhibited at the DAM Gallery in Berlin; the Media Center of New York; the Galerie Charlot in Paris; the Digital Art Center in Taipei; the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing; the MediaLAB at the University of Brasilia; the first digital art show in the metaverse by The State Hermitage Museum. Online his works have been presented on the occasion of projects produced with the institution World Intellectual Property Organization, the biennial The Wrong, and the gallery Arebyte. Furthermore, he directed the first glitch art exhibition ever made in Italy, “Tactical Glitches”, curated by Rosa Menkam and Nick Briz. His artwork 09|09 is part of the Hard Disk Museum collection. In 2019 he presented his work with the solo show “The Beautiful Minds” in Napoli, dedicated to raising autism awareness. Dom Barra also teaches glitch art and dirty new media at RUFA – Rome University of Fine Arts, where he regularly holds workshops and classes.