The review Of the human dimension. Contemporary art and visions along the Via Emilia continues the network exhibition project with a stop at the Studio la Linea Verticale in Bologna. With the staff of Michelangelo Galliani, Sagitta. Ordinary – Man – Extraordinarythe sculptural technique is declined according to the use of new and heterogeneous materials, thus bringing a practice still based on classical tradition closer to sensibilities closer to contemporary feelings.
The exhibition, curated by Maria Chiara Wang in collaboration with Alessandro Mescoli and the Cris Contini Contemporary Gallery, sees the critical and textual contributions of Michelangelo Galliani and Paolo Donini, Maria Chiara Wang, Marcello Bertolla and Alessandro Mescoli. Inaugurated on 21 March 2024, it will continue to be open until 30 May 2024. The focus of the exhibition is the revisiting of the canonical figure of martyrdom, through new meanings of the cult of San Sebastiano which affect an installation located at the center of the visit route.
Galliani personally follows the installation, creating a clean and minimal layout, in which the works demonstrate a balanced relationship with the space, with a precise visual impact. The series of six works enhances interventions of different styles and techniques, presenting a synthesis of the same performance practice. An instinctive approach to the material, where the final result includes finished parts with more fragmentary visions, according to the manual process of that direct carving of marble which does not involve a pre-established model, but leaves the task of gradually defining shapes to the time of creation new. A technical aspect thus becomes conceptual, and the work is truly iridescent and dynamic until the final stages of the carving, providing a narrative that crystallizes and stratifies over time.
In particular Night landscapes it lends itself to a union between the body and the landscape, in which the oxidation of the lead allows us to glimpse the whole of a figure lying on a flat surface, like a reference to the Shroud, or a vision close to the nuances of atmospheric perspective . A hand ideally pierces the support to reach the golden background circumscribed by the ripples, a link between two distant and difficult to land dimensions. So Postcard from Istanbul, another composite work involving a mirrored stainless steel base and a head sculpted in black marble, on which rests a lead column with a fragment of an architrave at the end. The complex is suitable for a dreamlike gaze that evokes memories of places distant even in time, whose history can only be reconstructed through ruins and the constant deterioration of the material.
Then entering the gallery, we immediately notice the installation Sagitta, a work taken as a hagiographic pretext regarding the figure of San Sebastiano for the entire exhibition. Here Galliani still thinks about painting, making his sculpture a practice that behaves similarly to any other type of representation in the artistic field, also mixed with povertyist and conceptual references. A torso and a head of black marble, the latter conceived only later in the construction phase, contrast with rougher and more incomplete visions, exposing the martyr’s body to a series of small red dots of lights in the neon, a symbolic element where the wound is a metonym for the arrows, as the effect is to its cause. Or maybe someone really is aiming their bow at us, but today rather with a different sight.
On the sides of the room there are two portable altars which, if closed, suggest the title of the whole: Landscape And Nebula. The first shows inside the continuity of the lines of a marble worked in low relief, in which a countryside scene recalls the curves of the landscape closest to the artist’s studio. The second, almost a transcription of the photograph recently taken by the Hubble telescope of the so-called “Pillars of Creation” in the Eagle Nebula, a sort of active stellar nursery.
Finally he welcomes us And fromanother fabula taken from everyday life worked in onyx and lead, which reproduces the thin wefts of the warp of a fabric, in memory of a physical presence to which the author dedicates his own particular type of tribute.
As from Paolo Donini’s text: «His aesthetic elections accept being incomplete, interrupted by doubt, broken by other materials, threatened, like everything else, with corruption and a lack of eternity». May form not deceive us because perfection does not belong to us, the fragmentary human experience, always compressed in the ephemeral and irreparable cycle of life.
