June 3rd – July 4th, 2004
Opening: June 3rd, 2004 7.30 pm
Galleria Paola Verrengia (via Fieravecchia 34 – Salerno) will display, until July, 4th 2004, the exhibition “Ultime rose siamesi” (drawings on paper) by Omar Galliani, Emilia.
Omar Galliani is one of the leading spokespersons of Italian contemporary art. He participated in the most important national and international artistic expositions, such as the Biennal of San Paolo (1981), the Quadriennale di Roma (1993) and the Venice Biennale (1984 and 1986). Among his solo shows we believe it would be worth mentioning the one held at Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (1995) and the one held at the Modern Art Museum of Pechino (2000). In 2003 he participated in the Biennal of Beijing with the triptych “Nuove Anatomie” exhibited at the China National Museum of Fine Art and awarded as the bestwork”Alchimista. del tempo presente” – as Antonio d’Avossa defined it – Omar Galliani focuses, in a time dominated by technology, his research on the possibilities of drawing through the use of charcoal and pencil. His works, permeated by the chiaroscuro dark-light dichotomy, reveal the materialization and dissolution of images induced to acquire the alchemic value of visions and symbols. Be they women, details of the body or merely of roses, the images take form from an indistinct background while the white paper or the natural support of poplar wood get scratched with his own hands. In particular the irregular surface of the wood support on whose fibers time had left the numerous traces of a story that determines an apparent movement of the background confirmed in its guise of primordial magma of matter where everything takes form and vanishes at the same time.
Depicted as evocative epiphanies, the images have been crystalized in the moment of their appearance here and now – designed to carry the memory of the void that they originated from and signed by the wound related to an existence suspended between two “not”, the not yet and the not anymore. The moment of appearance is, indeed, strictly connected to an enhancement of the image, always exposed to the hypothesis of a radical resetting.
The artist from Emilia Romagna will present, in Salerno, the series of drawings on paper “Ultime rose siamesi”, and the work “soltanto Rose” exhibited on June, 3rd 2004 at the Chiesa dell’Addolorata in Salerno. The “Ultime rose siamesi” created while he was working on the “soltanto Rose”, have been imagined as a book, a travel notebook where Galliani drew the roses remained from last years, the late roses from November. Red pink roses, ultramarine blue ones and black ones, each provided with its double side. Through the use of polychromatic pastels, the initial drawing traced by the artist has been, indeed, while folding the paper, duplicated in virtue of a contact to the other side, besides turning into something different, other. A further element featured by the randomness of sign, free and unpredicted. Galliani aims to tell us the mystery contained within the things we are surrounded by: they seem so obvious and familiar and yet they cherish the unknown. In the images of Galliani – that reveal the unknown in the guise of what is familiar – the invisible appears to remain what it is: unknown. The work “soltanto Rose” is comprised of two boards made of wood, juxtaposed to one another in a diptych: on one of them are blossoming, in the colorfulness of a well thought out chiaroscuro, roses, “only roses”; the other one is an explosion of pink red dragged around with bare hands in a carnal, instinctual gesture. Being a pure pigment, the pink red is juxtaposed to the black and white drawing in the guise of a dramatic, throbbing matter. The work has been presented as a “unicum” pervaded by a secret meaning that refers to something other than what it is.
