Gianluigi Colin
Gianluigi Colin. Mitografie
Fondazione Marconi Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
April, 14th – May, 17th 2012
The Fondazione Marconi is very pleased to announce the exhibition “Mitografie” by Gianluigi Colin.
Gianluigi Colin, an original and independent personality inside the art world, focuses his attention on contemporary symbols, using “the material that the world presents”. The subjects of his works are icons and events of the present, selected from the infinite amount of informations that the media present us. In Colin’s work there is a constant dialogue between images and words, that pays tribute to the most influencial semiologist of the 20th century, Roland Barthes.
Mitografie presents to the viewers part of the exhibition held at the IVAM (Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno) in Valencia. Twelve large-size works divided into four groups: Venus, Mars, Saturn and Mercury.
Gianluigi Colin bases his Mitografie on a question: what have Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Venus become for us?
His answer does not consist in taking a walk down nostalgia road. He attempts to track down distant survivals. He scrutinises the often overlooked outbreaks of classicism scattered in the cracks of our present. He uses the myth as a privileged instrument, not for abandoning this world but for running through it in a different way, by going down untrodden paths.
The artist focuses his artistic discourse on resolving how society reinterprets classical myths, starting from details that strike his imagination. Large-size works that investigate the relation between classical and modern myths. His works have a clear message and a strong visual impact, that help us to understand a more and more complex world.
In the words of the artist himself: “Classic narration used to be represented by a choral tale, shaping our fears, joys and pain. Nowadays myths settle in our minds through magazines, television and cinema. The mass media world is in many ways a new Olimpus where divinities, terrestrial yet unreachable, send messages to mortals like us, influencing and changing our actions, and somehow moulding our conscience”.
The artist works in a “world made of paper” using an elaborate technique: he browses through newspapers, choosing revealing images. He crumples these pages, and then photographs the wrinkled sheets of paper, which are then to be printed on magazine paper, and glued onto a layer made of newspapers. Finally he intervenes impetuously with his hands on this material, forming new creases. An effort to protect those images and those words from the unavoidable destiny of newspapers: the 24 hours lasting.
Gillo Dorfles writes: “ Colin – avenger and “decontextualizer” of an art that is elaborated and sublimated “by his own hand” – ends up reaching a mythical vision of our time, as well as an admonitory vision of future events. Yet he also, it must be emphasized, brings back a sculptural and figurative vision (without resorting to brushes or the ab ex-type gestural work that so often betray a work’s authenticity). Colin’s vision and his images reflect the newest developments in Italian creativity. Such work has no need for labels like “art” or “news”. There is only one truly appropriate way to comment upon these works – they are an “aesthetic mytography”.
Barbara Rose, who curated the last exhibition at the Museo Madre in Neaples, writes: “Colin thinks that today reality is seen as a peculiar mosaic made with overlapping fragments of photographic images. He is one of those artists who wants to be a witness of history like Goya, Rauschenberg and Warhol. Colin does not reproduce just a photographic image but he alter it, wrinkling and deforming the page on which is printed the file, then he takes photos of it.”
Vincenzo Trione, who curated Colin’s exhibition at IVAM, writes: “Colin makes postmodern frescos, where centrality is destroyed. He is committed in going beyond the usual rules of the story, he pulls out fragments without an origin, that he joins in unconventional almanac, with an audacious post-realism. It’s like attending a seductive shipwreck. The work gives itself as a crumpled material, an arsenal of frayed memories, like a rough sea, an exercise with an unexpected plastic and poetic consistency”.