The statement that struck me most during Tommaso Neri's interview was: “ I don't do art to find a new identity, I do it to feel totally free” MYTHOS publication - April 2004. The role of art is precisely this: to give freedom to those that produce it and to those that enjoy it. To come out of one's shell in total freedom in order to communicate with others. Art that comes from within reaches out to everyone of us, overcoming the often insurmountable gap that exists between the artist and the world. The images presented by Tommaso are very powerful, they will not be erased nor diluted. This is their true strength, overcoming the excessive gestuality of an art constructed on the needs of power, which is in turn constructed on blackmail and unpunished cynicism of those who have the means to shape public opinion and also the needs of aesthetics. The discomfort that Tommaso Neri feels in living everyday life, is the same discomfort that Pasolini felt who professed a deep hatred against the state in which he lived, that petty and capitalist bourgeois state that today affects everything and everyone. With his free and disruptive art, Neri also expresses a strong sense of repulsion for reality. Regime art always brings along impurity and corruption, whereas in the essential lines of Tommaso one finds elementary grace and purity. Driven by an expressive obsession, Neri uses different languages and techniques yet his message remains clear; his search for light (in every sense) develops through his photographs and his canvases and this makes him even more interesting and convincing. He reproduces reality protesting against widespread conformism, this is why he may appear too new and outrageous, but when an artist is passionate about what he does he is always a living protest.

Fioretta Faeti Barbato, Founder of the Literature Prize "Pungitopo" Organised by Comune di Sant'Agata Feltria, Pro Loco and "Il Sole 24 ore - Edagricole", along with Ministero dei Beni Culturali e del Consiglio Regionale delle Marche.

* note on the painting Wake Up by Tommaso Neri:

"The increasingly disrespecting attitudes of modern man to human life in general are reflected in this work. We give lip service to human rights and then do little or nothing about them. Thousands, as in Slumdog Millionaire  make their living derived from the rubbish dumps of our emerging cities and urban spaces. Hence the point to be made is not the specific, i.e., the Israeli bombing of Gaza, which is the source. Even though we all know it was horrific, but that for today's urban poor life has become day to day a living rubbish dump. The fact that the image is specifically derived is no matter as it is a painting and not a photograph (though taken from one), it could just as easily have been a painting from the Chinese or Pakistan earthquake events of recent years. It simply, affords itself as a mirror of the general brutality at work in the modern world where the daily existence of life seems to be valued less and less. In this respect it is no different from the violent academic war paintings of the Napoleonic age two hundred years ago, which similarly show brutal violence or guillotine victims (Gericault, Baron Gros, David et al). Crude it is, but so is the world in which we live,and in this respect it constitutes a sort of modern history painting, accreting to itself all the direct language of photography, but with a distant intensification as is possible in a painting."

©Mark Gisbourne (juror)

Celeste Prize 2009 selections were made by Mark Gisbourne, Adrienne Goehler and Victoria Lu. Selection of 6 Live Media sets by Claudio Sinatti.

Mark Gisbourne, Mark Gisbourne is a former Tutor, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London; Lecturer, Slade School of Fine Art, University College, University of London; and Post-Graduate Senior Lecturer in Post-war and Contemporary Art, at Sotheby's Institute (Manchester University Master's Programme). A former President of the British Art Critics Association (AICA), and International Vice President. He co-organised the World Congress of Art Critics at Tate Modern, 2000.