Press Release

Milan, Area35 Art Gallery

Opening: March 25, 6:00 PM

March 25 – April 25, 2025

Artists

Mauro Barbieri

Dennis Dawson

Sarah De Vos

Pietro Finelli

Toma Fichter

Axel Geis

Daniel Hartlaub

Gregor Hildebrandt

Sofiia Yesakova

Entering and exiting the roles that are assigned to us or that we seek or simply are, never defined and acquired, in this linked to that identification which cinema often, through its narratives and images, nurtures in us as viewers. It happens to adults, it happens to children, to adolescents, with the frequency that leads us to identify with the hero of the film that mesmerizes us, in this a substratum so powerful and identifying of our psyche, that it provokes pleasure and interest. In Goliarda Sapienza's book (1924-1996), Io, Jean Gabin, through the writer’s identification with the famous actor, Goliarda composes several layers of roles: there is the mythical one of a child who watches cinema and identifies with the iconic actor who also symbolized, in that case, a way of loving women. One layer leads to another: the beloved actor in the beloved film - Le Quai des brumes (1938) by Marcel Carné - Goliarda's writing, her childhood in Sicily in Catania, the stories of lived life, everything composes and knots together, the writing that not only tells but is the story itself, leading to the creation of those masterpieces that are her novels.

Identification is a constant in art and among artists. It is thanks to it that we 'steal' the craft, entering and exiting multiple lives, building existence. One of the founding characteristics of art in all its expressions is its ability to forge similarities, blending them and recreating them to take possession of them and give them new and different strength. Whether it is art or ancient architecture in the Renaissance, or the various "isms" that have conjugated the different representations of the chosen historical moment, we are dealing with this fundamental practice of making art. But identification also concerns life, whether when Marcel Duchamp plays chess, or when an actor and actress perform in the various roles dictated by the script of a film, or when an impeccable employee transforms into a thief. Art, which is a component of life, makes us reflect and gives us its multiplicity of feelings and perceptions, which only increases, in every generation, in every human being, the complexity of feeling as another(s), perhaps reminding us that we are formed by time and memory, by the future and the past, in the constant exchange of here and now.

Why Jean Gabin?

An important cinema scholar like Noël Simsolo dwells on the significance of Jean Gabin as a true noir icon, alien to the expansive sentimentality of French poetic realism. "What strikes – he writes – is his almost pathological interiority. A mute suffering in the face of decay, corruption, and vice. His acting goes from total sobriety to outbursts of choleric energy with a stunning truth. This way of living the role influenced John Garfield, Burt Lancaster, and Laurence Tierney. These noir actors knew his films and loved the modernity of his performance."

Keeping in mind this modernity of role and the actor’s capacity for identification, we honor his name through the identification that Goliarda Sapienza captured in her novel, which serves as the foundation for a possible discourse on art today. The invited artists, each with their own personality, interpret their role, whose presence, intertwined with the others, creates a new subject, a new organism, which we call an exhibition, which is in fact like the composition of a film, in which a narrative unfolds, linear or not, that questions and amazes us, setting a rhythm, which is that of art and artists. And of the world. (Pietro Finelli)

Image from Le récif de corail, 1939, Maurice Gleize

Exhibition Details

MOI, JEAN GABIN

Area35 Art Gallery | Via Vigevano 35, 20144 Milan

March 25 – April 25, 2025

Opening: Tuesday, March 25, 6:00 PM

Press Office: Valentina Malanot | valentinamalanot@gmail.com

Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday from 2:00 PM to 7:00 PM. Closed on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Appointment recommended.

Area35 Art Gallery

Tel. +39 339 391 6899 | info@area35artgallery.com | www.area35artgallery.com