DE AETERNO REDITU | Solo Exhibition | Berlin

6 September – 18 October 2014

Egbert Baqué Contemporary Art - Fasanenstraße 37, 10719 Berlin.

The exhibition De aeterno reditu brings together a series of paintings that the Italian artist Giuseppe Gonella painted especially for his solo show at Egbert Baqué Contemporary Art in Berlin. The focus of this series of paintings is the question of memory.

The beholder is invited to enter a world in which paintings depict fragments of memories and attest to the unstoppable flow of time. They are moments that were captured and found again years later; they make us surprised at their discovery as soon as we remember that they ever took place. We enter a world where space is extended and simultaneously condensed, and where the horizons of reality are not easily determined. For De aeterno reditu, the artist also created a large mural in the gallery’s first room, depicting the ruins of a basilica in Cyprus. Whereas the painter has changed his depiction, the ruins nonetheless communicate an almost perfect likeness. Even though they survived the passage of time and centuries of erosion, in the end they remain ruins that point to a world that existed in the past and yet is not all that different from our own. The players and protagonists are always different, but our universe remains the same. The mural represents an entrance to the cosmos of this exhibition and at the same time a kind of manual for the visitors, an element that sums up the visual world of the show in a programmatic way – a grandiose portal that leads us into a world of dreams, inviting us to lose ourselves in this territory that we seek to traverse and appropriate for ourselves. We are welcomed into a world where temporality is something ambiguous, where the works represent fragments of a truth, a reality containing elements of the artist’s memory, a poetic memorandum, a narrative in pictures that shows a life that was and, perhaps, will be again, though differently. Figures, borders, signs, and colors emerge from the canvases like fragments that seem to have been taken from the continuous flow of memory and thrown into an utopian and dream-like dimension. Giuseppe Gonella has created a space that transcends the limits of reality in order to find new narrative forms. Everything is uncertain, open-ended. In these paintings full of energetic brush strokes, delicately painted figures emerge. They seem to remain in a paradoxically stable equilibrium in which we lose and then find ourselves.

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