GIANNI CARAVAGGIO | THE SUN IS NEW EVERY DAY
-
Installation views
-
Press Release Text
Rolando Anselmi is pleased to announce Gianni Caravaggio's first solo exhibition in Rome, in the new gallery spaces. Caravaggio's practice, whose study of matter as a communicative tool alternates with the contemporary research for a metaphorical and evocative language, aims to investigate the imaginative power as the foundation of art. The exhibition develops over the two floors of the gallery, featuring new works specifically conceived for the occasion, which seem to emerge and generate from the same environment as natural elements. Caravaggio combines traditional materials with non-canonical elements, such as powdered sugar, beans or marble dust, generating unexpected relationships with human thoughts and leading the viewer to venture above objectivity, along the subjective experience. To welcome the viewer, Quando Natura Era Giovane (When Nature Was Young), a block of green Guatemala marble from which shapes of plant elements have been extracted, as to indicate the act of creation of the natural world. The obtained fragments of foliage are dislocated in a game of cross-references over the gallery space, which does not merely act as a setting for the suggestions of nature evoked by the artist, but becomes part of them, transforming itself into a landscape. The gallery staircase itself, in black Marquinia marble, becomes part of a site specific work, Immagine - Seme (Seed - Image), from whose veins comes out white marble dust, indicating the possibility of transformation within the artistic and natural process. The ephemeral white dust appears again in Prima Neve (First Snow), this time in the form of powdered sugar, turning the hard presence of marble into a malleable material, flattened under the weight of snow. The reference to the primary form of the column reappears in the twisted embrace of Coppia Che Non Si Incontra Mai (Couple That Never Meets), interfaced with the irradiation of Dopo l'Aurora Si Libera Il Sole (After The Dawn The Sun is Free), a work that is shown in its closed form on the upper floor. The exhibited works are defined by the artist as "devices for demiurgic acts", elements of active, generative and metamorphic production, capable of relating directly to the creative force acting within nature.
