LNDSCP / New means for Landscape
curated by Gabriele Salvaterra
Milan, Area35 Art Gallery 20/4– 23/5 2021
Leaving aside its descriptive, documentation and cognitive functions, the landscape has for more than a century become a genre that, paradoxically, no longer tells an external reality, objectively returned, but internal, subjective, poetic or conceptual dynamics.
Starting from the axiom that every creation is primarily a self-portrait, a representation of the self, the landscape genre experiences a particular contradiction, arising instead from the opposite and then being converted to completely new purposes.
Through the work of six contemporary artists, the exhibition presents different attitudes with which today it is possible to work on the landscape, distorting its starting conditions. Oscar Isaias Contreras Rojas starts from the historical-artistic stimuli of the past to explode them in composition with an expressionist-abstract flavor in which an atmospheric memory remains, Pietro Geranzani, like an archivist who notes pregnant elements in his diary, uses the landscape element to juggle in a dense historical and referential universe. Christian Macketanz, with its evocative environments populated by mysterious characters, sets up suffused and suspended atmospheres of a Neo-eighteenth-century pictorial metaphysics, while for Andrea Mangione the landscape is something that reaches us through the filter of youtube, google maps and online search engines, only to be "heated" by manual poetic techniques and the limits of hyperrealism.
Giacomo Modolo breaks down the initial figurative cells making the landscape a tool to develop an informal expressive practice full of personal memories; finally, for Giovanni Pasini, the natural datum becomes a pretext for investigations of a philosophical nature on overcoming the extreme anthropization of today which invites us to get closer to the equilibrium of oriental thought.
In a new way, each of the artists involved shows a path through which the landscape - an old genre dealing with air and external agents - is subjected to a process of internalization, becoming (but basically it has always been so) a linguistic fact.
The exhibition curated by Gabriele Salvaterra is the result of a collaboration between Area35 Art Gallery of Milan, CRAG Gallery of Turin and Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery of Trento. The exhibition project born from this co-production between different galleries will travel on an itinerant basis in the three cities, adapting and changing in the different exhibition contexts starting from the same conceptual framework. For this LNDSCP / New means for landscape will have a long course throughout the first half of 2021, which will be accounted for through a publication aimed at documenting the entire project.
Artworks