Current
| Sergio Ragalzi. Insetti | |||||||||||
OPENING Thursday 19 September 2024 at 6 p.m. 19.09 – 26.10.2024 Biasutti & Biasutti gallery presents an exhibition dedicated to Sergio Ragalzi (Turin, 1951 – 2024). A tribute to the artist, recently deceased, a protagonist of the Turin scene and not only, whose research has always focused on man, on the sense of bewilderment that accompanies the evolution of the species and on an analysis of the roots of existence. The title of the exhibition, Insetti (Insects), refers to the homonymous cycle of paintings created starting from the end of the 1980s, as an evocative phase of Franz Kafka's famous story on metamorphosis. Ragalzi explained in a recent interview: "I have always worked on man; I have explored all the possibilities of bombardment and conditioning inside and outside of us: we are subject to unpredictable eventualities and just like Kafka's Gregor Samsa we risk waking up one morning in the body of an insect".[1] Through this Kafkaesque approach to art, Ragalzi seems to free this irrational anxiety, defining his “inner and existential work made up of two components: one material and the other figural, not figurative, but of corporeal elements identified with the malaise of existence”.[2] Here the artist’s uneasiness finds an outlet in the large canvases, exhibited in the gallery spaces. Armies of insects, “fearsome and […] annoying”[3], a metaphor for the limits and finitude of man, move occupying all the possible space, in sequences with tight and insistent rhythms, like markings, almost a code, an insect-like alphabet. “With insects I began to create this sort of printed, repetitive and obsessive painting”[4], Ragalzi declared in the conversation with Trini, an exact iconographic reproduction, new forms of hybrid life represented from above, in a format that makes them specular and multipliable, stamped and yet hand-painted. Ragalzi's language is original and wise, whose communicative force is substantiated by the constant presence of "black", deep, total, disruptive, "a non-color", he claimed, which "creates vibrations on the surface"[5], which includes and excludes, which is dark and light. The aligned, immobile and timeless forms come to life, agitated by the use of a brilliant gold or a bright red or more often by the predominant white. A profound and conscious vision, sometimes uncomfortable, which has never followed the market’s laws or the aesthetics of contemporaneity, but with a capacity for dreaming, albeit dark and painful, to enclose in his tired canvases the traces and signs of history. Until October 26, 2024
[1] Mugnaini A., Sergio Ragalzi. Neronatura, Milano, Prearo Editore, 2023, p. 22 [2] In Arte Contemporanea, Anno 5 Numero 25, novembre-dicembre 2010, intervista di R. Anselmi a S. Ragalzi [3] Tommaso Trini, Colloquio in studio con Tommaso Trini, in Sergio Ragalzi. Neronatura, Prearo Editore, Milano, 2023, p. 25 [4] Ibid. [5] Ibid.
Galleria Biasutti & Biasutti, Via Bonafous, 7/L – 10123 Torino | |||||||||||