ECHOES | SOLO EXHIBITION | MILAN

The title of Giuseppe Gonella's new solo show in Milan (Motta di Livenza, 1984), Echoes, metaphorically refers to the painter's pictorial trait made up of vibrant brushstrokes, chromatic reverberations and tonal dissonances that contribute to giving shape to his personal figurative universe. The canvas Simulacri (2022) leads the gaze into a sort of library-archive whose frames are like 'windows' on the world populated by objects and images that are the projection of desires or aspirations not yet realized, substantiated exclusively in the work. In this world, the painting refers to the notion of simulacrum understood as an appearance released from a specific reality; we are not faced with the negation of a model, because the figures imprinted on the canvas by the painter are the pretext for giving shape to instances and events that have yet to manifest themselves. Secondly, the simulacra are understood as the ancient statues depicting divinities, to emphasize the importance and symbolic value of the objects that give shape to the domestic everyday life of each of us and that in recent years - marked by the digitization of life and social relations accelerated by the Covid-19 epidemic - has profoundly changed. Some recent paintings by the artist are based on the predominance of black within which vivid glimmers of light appear: in Night ́s light, body and turtle (2021) a female figure wanders at night in a city with suspended and visionary contours where anything can happen and the boundary between reality and dream becomes blurred; the painted scene does not want to crystallize a precise moment, but to bring back the sensations of a hypothetical meeting of glances with the protagonist. The nocturnal climate distorts the objective vision, alters the forms, leads to a climate made up of unexpected epiphanies and alienating elements. Among them a series of small turtles which, perhaps confused by the glow of the city, are no longer guided towards the sea by the moon and are found swallowed up in the urban streets. Within this tumult of shades and panels, hands appear that seem to want to help small animals, but rather than a narratively coherent occurrence they are the inner thought of the woman, thus creating a multiplication of temporally and spatially dissonant elements in the canvas. In Mirrow (2021) the same nocturnal atmosphere is created through a particular black colour that is the background to the features of a young woman inside a Berlin industrial building. In this painting there is a peculiar chromatic dimension played between darkness and sudden lights that reverberate in a mirroring surface, thus subverting the naturalistic vision of things. In Gonella's paintings there is often a direct connection between the human figures represented and the context that surrounds them: in Something like a flip to inside out your world between worlds (2022) the human figure depicted is surrounded by a pictorial swirl that seems to evoke it. inner states and tensions. For the painter, in fact, the landscape is often the expressive theater of a whole series of emotional impulses such as the Eclipse canvas (2022) where the aerial point of view on the morphology of a city is the bearer of melancholy, nostalgic and perhaps uncertain feelings for the future. .

‘Echoes’ originally was written on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Echoes’, Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Milano, IT. Copyright © 2022 Carlo Sala

CARLO SALA - A BIOGRAPHY

Carlo Sala is an Art critic and curator and professor at the Master in Photography at  IUAV in Venice. He is artistic director of Photo Open Up - International Festival of Photography in Padova (IT). As a member of Fondazione Fabbri’s Scientific Board since 2010, he curates the modern and contemporary Photography Festival F4 / un’idea di Fotografia and the Francesco Fabri Contemporary Art Prize focused on emerging and International art. Among other exhibitions and projects he has curated the 12th International Architecture exhibition at Venice Bienniale, the MUFOCO, Museum of Contemporary Photography and at  MART ( Museum of modern Art of Trento and Rovereto. He wrote essays for about thirty publications edited by among others Allemandi, Marsilio, Silvana Editoriale, Mimesis and Skira.