Venice, 17 June 2024 – “Sacrifice, determination, spirituality, continuous research”. That’s how it is Gabriele Maquignazthe artist of the “High Lands”, born in Aosta in ’72 and raised at the foot of the Matterhorn, manages to create his magnum opus big Bang. A mystical and spiritual explosion on display until November 24th at Venice Art Biennale (Grenada National Pavilion at Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello), and until 6 October in Aosta, in the spaces of the Church of San Lorenzo, with a monograph dedicated to him by the autonomous Region. Two more exhibitions are scheduled for the next few months: from 4 July the artist will be present at the IMAGO Art Gallery in Lugano and in September in New York.
Maquignaz, how his work was born Big Bang?
” Big Bang is the mother work that contains all my life’s work and, conceptually, all the work that has been done in the history of art up to today. It is made with a 28 caliber rifle and broken ammunition. With this weapon, from a distance calculated and reasoned based on the size of the canvas, fires on a container of color which explodes, explodes on the canvas and symbolically and conceptually creates for the first time in the history of art the birth of space- time goes to imprint the Universe on the canvas can be considered an informal mystical philosophical work of art”.
Gabriele Maquignaz, the artist of ‘Terre alte’
What was the objective of your artistic research?
“Understanding what existed before the Universe. I undertook a very profound spiritual, mental and psychological research, the result of 100 thousand hours of work, on average 17 hours a day, given that I have always slept 5 hours a night”.
And did you manage to find an answer?
“Art must go beyond religion but I like to imagine that the primordial explosion is the fruit of God’s will, a superior will to give life, not a scientific coincidence. I believe that before the Big Bang there were God, were there an afterlife.”
Do you seek your relationship with God in art?
“Everything starts from there. I come from a Catholic family, my uncle, Don Luigi Maquignaz, was Pope Wojtyla’s companion when he came to the Aosta Valley on holiday. As a child, under the Matterhorn looking in front of me I said to myself ” space is no longer sufficient, it must be overcome.” I have always been convinced that there was another dimension of the human soul that goes beyond matter, beyond the space-time in which we live with our body”.
A work by Gabriele Maquignaz (© Stefano Venturini)
Philippe Daverio defined his art as an overcoming of Fontana’s spatialism.
“Professor Daverio, who was a bit of my mentor, grasped a very important passage. When Fontana created the spatial concept, the famous cut on the canvas, he created a new space in the history of art. I surpassed the space creating, first, a symbolic Door to the Afterlife, a codified and reasoned cut on canvas: when, having arrived in the afterlife, I shoot the rifle, causing the explosion, conceptually and artistically, the space-time is born which is imprinted to always on the canvas. It is here that the artistic overcoming, the evolution, of Fontana’s spatialism takes place”.
What message do you want to give through your art?
“I want to create beauty through art, something that gives people emotions but above all that makes them reflect on the meaning of human existence. In the current scenario which sees two wars underway, I also have the possibility of sending a positive message by transforming a ‘firearm into a weapon for peace’.
