The aim of the exhibition is to propose a wide-ranging look at young Italian painters trained mainly between Venice and Florence. I think it is inevitable, living in cities like these, not to remain sterile in front of the historical and artistic heritage, and I am not just talking about museums, churches or monuments, but more about the mysterious nostalgia that these cities know how to conceal, stories that have never been lived and never seen, real or imaginary visions that hide and sediment within their walls, capable of creating new paths and suggestions linked to a physical and at the same time invisible memory of streets, squares and places. The artists proposed, although with very different pictorial research, make this inclination to memory and nostalgia seep from their work, images that need to reconnect with the memory of both a near present and of remote and imaginary pasts. Often drawing on distant references and suggestions. The very title of the exhibition wants to evoke this: a bewitched garden in which plants of all kinds and species manage to grow among the ghosts of the past. As in the works by Michele Cesaratto in which friends and acquaintances of the artist are portrayed in settings and landscapes linked to the artist's childhood places but also reminiscent of early 15th century Italian painting, or as in the paintings by Luca Ceccherini in which themes and iconographies of 14th century Italian painting are represented with a language that takes the borderline between painting and represented object to the limit. Or in the works of Oxana Tregubova in which a sacred and primordial relationship with nature is suggested with a language that is mindful of the artist's intimacy and personal memories. Or as in the works of Sofia Massalongo in which delicate details of gestures and objects of the artist's friends take on the appearance of simple and indelible distant memories through painting. Or as in the works of Miriam Marafioti in which the city its changes and sedimentations are expressed in a landscape painting that investigates the physical memory of specific places. The result that perhaps all these artists have in common is the creation of images that in the end always remain ambiguous, there is never anything unveiled or explicitly ‘pornographic’, they are real images that try to show the hiding place of something remote, the memory of a gesture, a nostalgia for a particular day or a distant world barely perceived, in which we easily lose sight of the border between the real and the magical.
Leonardo Devito
Erik Saglia takes on these considerations for his second solo show to propose an installation, made with his renowned technique. As the result, the entire installation is a Cosmogony of signs and intersecting lines, of vectorial axes, of organized schemes of an unorganized reality, where the intersection of the abscissa and the ordinate organizes the vision of both the Artist and the Man. The visitor is compelled to contemplate it exactly as it happens while observing the cosmos through a telescope. Saglia’s Art is a full-size Portable Cosmogony because it can be carried “within us”.