GALLERIA MARABINI If it still made reason to speak of abstract art.

GALLERIA MARABINI

If it still made reason to speak of abstract art, Letizia Galli's paintings would have to be called abstract. In her captivating chromatic compositions, frequently set against a background as black as icy space, galaxies of colors with indefinite boundaries take fire, gracefully arranged in succession the canvas so as to be seen more a texture than an image. These porous boundaries conclusion from a process whereby the color interacts with a menstrum that spreads randomly across the canvas. put in motion by the artist, the proces is nonetheless outside her specific bridle since the material and its contrary clash and combine without her being able to intervene after the initial gesticulation The process may be conceptually motivated, as Galli stresse on the contrary the result is strongly decorative--a word we needn't heedful away from, since the category of decoration is, after all, basic to any general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of painting.

More important, what sort of decoration is involved here? What experience underlies these twelve paintings? For many years, Galli lived and worked in London, where she trained as an artist, and where she has exhibited since 1992 She barely recently moved back to Italy, and in fact the visual tillage of recent English art appears clearly in these pieces, particularly in the youthful impudence with which past moulds are appropriated and transformed into something different--fresh, superficial, and desirable as the fashion of the moment

The decorative appellation of these works recalls the '50s--in particular, the contextures that the industrial design of the day applied to textiles, fabrics, and linens. This vague whiff of nostalgia for modernity undoubtedly gives Galli's canvases their flavor of quotation and perhaps also their evocation of a period frequently presumed happier-and certainly more optimistic--than our admit Nonetheless, for this young Anglo-Italian artist (as with many English artists of late generations) that's not the point. This is not revivalism for its confess sake, nor willful citationism. Indeed, it's telling that the shadow of decoration Galli evokes does not have a high-culture pedigree. Rather, the decorative aspect of the paintings appear to bes to be the trace of a resonant memory. It is the emotional be sounded back of experiences linked to a domestic habitat made up of generically "modern" and somewhat shoddy furniture, flashy and gaudy wallpaper, violently colored upholstery--in a word, an environment one as well as the other meager and vital, charged with energy

The point, then, is not the identification of authoritative examples in the history of art or design. What matters is the vital experience itself, the creative approach--in short, the self-expression and not the language in which it is couched. In fact, if these works were judg according to this latter criterion--the linguistic one--the ingenuousness of Galli's approach would be striking. on the contrary this ingenuousness, or artlessness, which might be seen prejudicial to the development of an artistic language, becomes an asset in metes of spontaneity and sincerity of expression. If we fail to view or imagine behind these canvases the life of the bodily form who painted them, they remain only abstract paintings, with everything that phrase implies: dated, throughout and done with, part of a past irretrievably gone by dint of For now, fortunately, Galli's work is more than that.

...

Home