SIGNS, LIGHTS, COLOURS
Curated by Angelo Mistrangelo
The exhibition was created in collaboration between the A.P.A. (Piedmontese Art Association) and Areacreativa42 in the Villa Vallero exhibition space (City of Rivarolo – Turin). The title “Segni Luci Colori” wants to embrace the diversity of the works on display and highlight the proposals to read the works of the three artists involved: Giorgio Ramella, Johannes Pfeiffer and Enzo Gagliardino, who offer works related to their long artistic experience in Piedmont and beyond.
Time, space and environment are the decisive elements of the “corpus” of works that characterises the itinerary of the Segni Luci Colori exhibition, between conceptual investigation and interior reflections, chromatic suggestions and metaphysical structures.
That’s an itinerary that unites three artists with a different language, but linked by a common expressive tension that emerges from the compositions, from the texture of the significant signs, from the ability to “occupy” space with matter.
An exhibition, therefore, that encompasses the atmosphere of a contemporary age supported by a singular vision of reality and of our most complex time and, increasingly, reaching out towards technology, image and pressing communication.
They are three artists who bring us back to visual culture, dreams and nature.
In Enzo Gagliardino’s works the discussion unfolds through a detailed analysis of the urban architecture, the anonymous facades of the buildings, the sequence of windows that open onto the world with the intense and unstoppable flow of history and society.
Nothing is left to chance, but every detail, every glimpse of the environment, every fragment of a revisited identity becomes another place for a highly meditated, measured painting.
It is like if Gagliardino recomposed on the walls of an entire existence a continuous dialogue between man and the profound silences, and the scans of the bricks and the memories. A dialogue which, from time to time, transforms the facades, rigorously and geometrically essential, into the “metaphor of life” and, also, symbolically, expresses the absence of the people behind the rectangles of the silent windows.
And bricks are some aspects also of Johannes Pfeiffer’s experience, which Andrea Balzola has defined as “bricklayer and installation smith”, where “brick, preferably an artisan product, is the cellular form of its forms”. Forms that belong to nature, to its design of space with synthetic fiber cables, to the encounter with the granite “One cubic meter”, exhibited in the park of the Castello di Racconigi, during the 2013 International Sculpture Biennial. And they are interventions and lyrical situations that recreate the structure of Santa Maria del Monastero – La Manta or the Museum of the Opera del Duomo in Pisa. The nylon threads become beams of light that illuminate the interior of an ancient nave, the courtyard of the Rectorate of the Turin University, and compose, in “E la nave va”, a tribute to Giovanni Falcone.
For Giorgio Ramella, the “Homage to Hokusai” is the guiding thread of a research which outlines his journey to the East.
And the graffiti signs, the attention for the master of “The great wave of Kanagawa” (from the “Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji”), the energy of the representation, recalls the haiku verses of the Japanese Fujiwara No Sadaie: “a bench of clouds / detached from / summit of the mountain ». Ramella entrusts the images with the sense of a “writing” where there is all her “imagery as if they were frames of a story” (Lea Mattarella). And they are light clouds, kites, newly defined trees and fish that go up the stream of water, which give the narration the charm of a distant time that re-emerges with the strength of the chromatic data, of the memory, of a creative and magical season – mind emerges from the East.
Angelo Mistrangelo