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Galleria Francesca Kaufmann
Via dell'Orso 16, 20121 Milano , Italy
Tel.++39 02 72094331
Fax++39 02 72096873
Hours: Tue.-Sat. 3:30pm-7:30pm.
Contact: Francesca Kaufmann
E-mail: franceska@micronet.it

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Galleria Francesca Kaufmann
 
Gianni Caravaggio New View

The first solo show in Italy by Gianni Caravaggio, entitled New View, was hosted at the Francesca Kaufmann Gallery.
Born in 1968, Caravaggio studied at the Accademia di Brera under Luciano Fabro, before emigrating to Stockholm where he has been resident for many years. In 1999, he was invited to participate in the Advanced Course in Visual Arts at the Ratti Foundation in Como and in 2000 was selected as one of ten artists representing Italy at PS1 in New York. Caravaggio’s art should be understood as the work of an explorer who has set out to discover the reality hidden inside the material substance of objects. Objects stimulate the artist to create instinctive worlds, which denote the spatial dimensions of the work. Caravaggio’s explorations aim to uncover a veiled substance, a nucleus, an interiority, which exists but cannot be seen when glancing, as we commonly do, all to quickly at everyday images, whether artificial or natural. We should not only be looking at the external surface of these images, however. In the large-scale sculpture Panorami, a solid mass of randomly stacked sheets of white paper evokes an infinite number of landscapes, their outlines suggested by the silhouettes of the torn sheets. Caravaggio uses the same substance in Attimo: a mound of paper under which the concave, spherical space of the work’s nucleus is completely hidden, and within which the artist secretly placed a seed. From the aesthetic definition of this, the greater existence of intuition emerges. The reproduction of the sphere, which is at once enclosed yet free within the paper mound, calls to mind the natural perfection of the seeds that are found when you peel and slice into an apple. The entire space is thus determined by the seed, which sprouts and creates it. In New View, the large installation that gives the show its title, stacks of glossy magazines have been spread around the room. The magazines have been cut up and hollowed out to create—before the eyes of the spectator bedazzled by the chromatic impact—an almost molecular equilibrium of concentric nuclei that exist in harmony with the decomposed colors and shapes of the images and figures from the magazines. The colors of the light fabrics that Caravggio uses in Bandiera naturalizzata (Sindelfingen)(Naturalized Flag), evoke the chromatic layers of landscapes, borders, and ideas. Overlapping in a different way to the cut and torn paper sheets, these colored cloths become the instrument by which Caravaggio creates a kind of “flag of memories,” which is at once personal and understood by all. By examining the flag and turning it over in our hands, the viewer comes to understand how landscapes change.


Bandiera naturalizzata (Sindelfingen)
Gianni Caravaggio
2000
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