Responsible Gambling

Daniele Torcellini

With the irony and playful spirit that characterize him, Luca tells us about the world we live in, nodding to a pop and comic-book imagery—drawn from Lowbrow Art—without neglecting to highlight the critical issues and raw nerves of advanced capitalist societies, in a short circuit made even more explicit by the use of mosaic. His lightning-quick gags—humorous, surreal, and sometimes provocative—depicted with a handful of tiles in striking chromatism and enviable powers of synthesis, elicit a bittersweet smile when we realize that the quirky little figures animating them speak to us not only of joie de vivre, but also of inequality, alienation and unease, environmental degradation, and technological impact, blending ingredients seamlessly, just as happens in real life.

With the Lottery project, created as part of the 9th Biennial of Contemporary Mosaic in Ravenna, 2025, Luca expands the scope of his artistic practice by staging a participatory performance of magnificently ambiguous character. The operation was conceived with the idea of creating a work from the crowd series in an open workshop during the months of the Biennial, to be raffled off in a lottery that people could enter by purchasing a printed multiple.

However, the creation of the mosaic follows a different and alternative path from the usual. Rather than sketching the characters of his animated crowds with the inventive spirit and iconic power that define him, Luca welcomes members of the public—one by one, diligently waiting in line for their turn (and nurturing the secret hope of winning a work of art)—to portray them and converse with them, so that the crowd is no longer anonymous but made up of real people, and the portrait becomes an occasion for sociality, a trigger for relationships.

With a knight's move, Luca thus shifts the emphasis—or rather—multiplies the emphases of his project. While organizing a lottery is expressly a national-popular affair, here the dynamics of leisure and entertainment, of stimulating the imagination, and of social and collective ritual are emphasized. At the same time, we find ourselves questioning the meaning of participation, in a deliberately precarious balance between participating in a lottery by buying a ticket and being part of an artistic journey shared with the artist and other participants, who are nevertheless also potential competitors in the final draw.

But that's not all. From the Christmas tombola to compulsive gambling, the shift is not immediate but potential, and art, as a complex symbolic system, calls for a critical and reflective reading of what it addresses. And so the carefree idea of pursuing "dreams" on the cheap also touches upon the problems of developing addictions, financial losses, and the psychological impact of social and relational isolation.

Closing the circle are the numbered multiples for the draw, as if they were lottery tickets. Luca creates eighteen small-scale mosaics from which he produces stencil prints, reproduced with bursts of spray cans in vivid complementary colors and in limited editions. With the irreverent collision between mosaic practice and street artist moves, Luca stages a wide range of implications of challenging fate, reminding us of the weaknesses and clumsiness of human greed, at the very moment when—ticket in hand—we hope to be kissed by fortune, amid the hollow celebrations of the winners, the risks one is willing to accept, dreams, deceptions, abuses, "monkeys" on our backs, and heads exploding in front of slot machines.