Italy - CONSOLATA RADICATI DI PRIMEGLIO
My paintings choose the colours of nature, life and matter.
Anyone who approaches them sees the reflection of what is concealed in his soul, of which sometimes he is not even aware: emotions, feelings, present or future situations of life, profound states of mind and then excitement.
Nearly all my works of the last five years have an element in common, the circle: it has no beginning, no end, no direction or orientation, and often becomes a symbol of the sky, of divinity and of all that is spiritual. Perfection, eternity, harmony, infinity, completeness, union, a single line whose ends join together to be absorbed one in the other, the spirit and the immateriality of the soul.
A magic and celestial symbolism.
The circle is the sky, the cycle of life, time. Its movement is perfect, unchanging, without any beginning, end or variation.
The circle is a sacred space, a temple, a sanctuary, a source of energies and spiritual forces. The circle is an insuperable limit that provides protection, from the first nomad communities to the magic traditions of the ancient Babylonians, to medieval religious rituals and renaissance ceremonies, to oriental philosophies, a deposit of degrees of knowledge, the transposition of cosmogonic imagery.
A mandala of unknown and longed-for worlds.
Text by the artist
Italy - ALDO MONDINO
Hedonistic and abstruse, Mondino’s painting combines Aristotle’s dual possibility of art as form in itself or for itself and as form mixed with matter. Matter in the sense of exoticism and the culture of diversity. The representation is never symbolic or solemn. From this culture he accepts the lowering of depth and the love of news stories. This is where the artist finds his pleasure. The possibility of starting from the detail of the gesture or the figure, far from any exemplary attitude or desire to capture the absolute. Matter has no absolute. At the most there is transformation through form. This is the task of art. Its very essence. So Mondino, shut up in his atelier, paints the traces of a real or imaginary journey. It doesn’t matter. If there is a result, it’s always the same. Positively obligatory. It aims to restore the figure and at the same time divest it of its clothing, viewed from a phenomenonological standpoint in an appearance or a gesture.
Then memory intervenes. The memory of art, which has unlearned by heart what it has seen in order to transform it. The creative journey, like the real one, produces a family of pictures, related to one another for their style and packaging, drawing and painting. The relationship can be identified in a number of invariant elements, in the presence of a black and a red, never violent but almost commenting on the representation.
Text by Achille Bonito Oliva
Italy - FRANCESCO LUSSANA
The human being is first and foremost homo faber, able to create, to produce, to give shape and life to the materials provided by nature and the period that he lives in. Lussana discovers that the divine gift of Art can be found in the factory, in the workplace… Where every day there is an alternation of rhythmical movements, sequences, patterns, human presences and all those contraptions that now seem possessed with human form, with a life of their own…
The noise of the metal-working machines, the rhythmic beat of presses, the laying of blocks of steel, the alarm bells, the clinking of the chains, the screech of the marking tools... Human breathing… Musical notes for Lussana, adagios, slow rhythms for his Art… And so a new Fluxus experience is unwittingly born, made of moments of sound and of works of art, skilfully brought up to date… Lussana succeeds in blending the characteristics of the historic Fluxus movement with the theme of reuse and recycling, the common denominator of “arte povera” and of the contemporary current of the Art of recycling.
And he creates stage sets for his own concerts, for museums, transforming factories and warehouses into artistic archives, giving life to the factories which are unwitting incubators of the Art of this century…
He cuts and drills metal sheets, models and assembles them… He makes them fluctuate in the air, allowing the air and its currents to become protagonists and musicians… Currents are formed between the sheets and the cuts… Sounds… Magic… A new page on Art’s musical score is being composed…
Text by Serena Mormino
Italy - MARIA ELISA D’ANDREA
In my work, thread is all about waiting. Waiting as a dramatic aspect of our existence, linked to sickness and treatment, to psychological suffering. Waiting as a passive situation where you must be patient, allow things to take their time, instead of being an active participant you become passive, and all you can do is wait. Working with thread is a meditative, therapeutic activity. It calms anxiety and helps us bear the suspense.
Weaving thread refers to birth, to creation. Cutting the thread, when the work is finished, recalls the cutting of the umbilical cord, the beginning of life which is also the beginning of death.
Text by the artist
Italy - ROBERTO BRICALLI
The apparent contradiction in Bricalli’s work is perhaps its most precious and interesting artistic feature.
The strength and the geometrical decision of the forms, in distinct contrast with the purity of lines of his faces; the determination and importance of marble and bronze in producing works with a disarming aesthetic lightness.
A game or perhaps a continuous conflict between his maquettes and the choice of material.
Classical lines revisited, extended in the manner of Arp, suddenly become harder and more modern at the same time.
Interplays of containers, spaces, openings and architectures that support and protect his faces… Moments in which the matter is lacking, as though the artist were still looking for something…
Bricalli resumes classical shapes and subjects and makes them belong to his own time. He experiments and studies, but remains wisely and nobly anchored to the principle material of sculpture, to marble, with its strength and preciousness.
He “modernises” the forms, even though he is able to place them historically in past times and cultures, as in his recent works of the tinache the fruit of months of study in South America, in Argentina where he has already been a guest at successful exhibitions.
Text by Serena Mormino