SOUND | Gallerie Sonore: concerts at Gallerie d’Italia with Davide Boosta Dileo - second edition

Gallerie Sonore is an innovative sound art project launched by the Gallerie d'Italia in collaboration with Davide Boosta Dileo.

Gallerie d'Italia and Davide Boosta Dileo, keyboard player and co-founder of Subsonica, present the second edition of Gallerie Sonore, a sound art performance project to give voice, and music, to the Bank's collections.

After his first journey through art and sound, Davide Dileo returns in 2025 with four new works designed for the sites in Milan, Naples, Turin and Vicenza. Each leg of the journey begins with an intimate encounter with a work of art – a painting, sculpture or photograph – chosen from the Intesa Sanpaolo collections or from the temporary exhibitions held at the Gallerie d'Italia.

At each concert, the museum experience is transformed into a live performance, a conversation between past and present, between image and transformation. What you hear is not what you see, but what the work whispers – and what the music tries to make audible.

Gallerie Sonore aims to create an immersive and transversal experience, linking the four Gallerie d'Italia venues under the same matrix of artistic interpretation via the medium of sound.

Event within the scope of SOUND, the Gallerie d’Italia music project. 

The artist's account of the works that inspired the musical composition of the
pieces.

A photograph of Mina, taken from the Intesa Sanpaolo Publifoto Archive, is transformed into a visual score. The sounds of her voice become living sound material. A weaving of syllables that accompany a composition written using the IWATO scale, an oriental musical grammar that steals the show from the western scale we have always been accustomed to.

At the heart of the exhibition “CERAMICS AND CLOUDS” which interweaves classicism and comics, the figure of Dionysus – god of transformation, ambiguity and multiplicity – becomes the symbol of the value of diversity.

The “Seikilos epitaph”,  the oldest complete song in history known to us today, is performed for the first time in a new guise: lyrical vocals and synthesizers in a reversal of paradigms, in the wake (and expectations) of Dionysus.

The work of Caravaggio captures the moment when the arrow strikes, but the body has not yet succumbed. The painting becomes an emotional score, where time dilates and the threshold between life and death becomes sound. The work is sonified on the basis of the concept of suspension: tense silences, slow beats, breaths captured and transformed into spectral resonances. 

The painted representation is transformed into a film suspended in a freeze frame, given voice through the performance of a theme for digital orchestra that conveys weight, power, resignation and hope.

Disco in forma di rosa del deserto by Arnaldo Pomodoro is the form to be explored. The voice of a rare interview with the artist traces the pentagram within which the notes are sculpted. Fractures and volumes become musical events. Depths become heights, surfaces become rhythm, geometries become frequency. Bronze, a silent material, gains a voice and duets in real time with the artist's own voice as he recounts his vision of art in one of his lesser-known interviews.

Davide Boosta Dileo is a musician, DJ, composer, author, producer and sound artist with a career spanning 25 years. Co-founder and keyboardist of Subsonica, Dileo has contributed to 8 platinum albums, selling over 50 million copies, winning numerous awards, including the MTV Europe Award and the David di Donatello for the soundtrack of the film Adagio by Stefano Sollima. His various collaborations include works with Mina, Placebo, Skin and Depeche Mode. In 2021, Facile, his solo album for piano and electronics, entered the classical music charts and was broadcast by major international channels. The following year saw the global release of his six-part album Post Piano Session under his label, Torino Recording Club, which was performed in iconic venues from the Servant Jazz Quarter in London to Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome. In autumn 2024, in conjunction with the four Tour de Gallerie Sonore, Dileo will open Sonogramma, his artist’s studio in Turin, dedicated to exploring sound in art.