Exhibitions, Italy, Massa-Carrara, Montignoso, 30 April 2016
FISHING EPIPHANIES
Fishing epiphanies is a travel through Andrea Giusti's time vortex that shows, in his paintings exposed at Villa Schiff-Giorgini at Montignoso, a new attitude from him and an unusual predisposition for the support, the colours and the represented themes.
Recently he has decided to paint on wood or cardboard, leaving for the moment the canvas aside. He immediately explains to me that it's a different choice because on the canvas the colours are absorbed more slowly and so they lightly lose their intensity. While on wood or cardboard the colour is immediately absorbed and you can rapidly pass on another colour where there is a clear detachment, clearly evident in his work. The brush stroke is swifter and it slides with more agility making much clearer and much more definite the pictorial sign such as in the painting Un re senza cuore.
He is aware of using a poor material compared to the canvas, which always implies a certain sacredness. Wood or cardboard have got particular features that canvas doesn't offer such as the immediate gesture that doesn't allow much afterthought and let you use both acrylic colours and felt-tip pens, important for doodling and writing as children do. They make lively, unexpected and instinctive the sign left on the surface, recognizable in Strani compagni di gioco and Tu puoi.
This manner for Giusti is essential because the act seems almost anticipate the concept as well as he used to do in his period of emotions dripping, when his unconscious guided his hand and his subject were shaped by what his mood, connected parallely with his unconscious, his soul and his heart, was dectating in that particular moment.
Andrea's painting, as he writes on his notebook, is nothing else that the game of his emotions that play with the colours and, between a brush stroke and the other one, run and run after each other on wood or cardborad, until exhausted finally they fall asleep and everything is silent, leaving a charm and a fine memory of that game.
Some of his writings are represented in his paintings by verses, words, numbers, syncopated protests, exisistential statements that attest a continuous stream of thought and they are the most direct means to be in the world and to relate to it. His pictorial subjects reveal themselves as “epiphanies” that return something already known and metabolized to our imaginary, as inner fragments that are deciphered by the colours.
When Andrea paints, he perceives his mood as a special moment in which any person, object and situation of common life becomes revelation of the real meaning of his living. It's here that he fishes, in the stream of consciousness, the connections that mingle in his existence, lived as map, and in the world, lived as territory.
So fishing epiphanies becomes for Giusti a way to represent with colours the associations of ideas that, showing in the continuous stream of consciousness, assume more and more that verism of thought which gives sense and value to our behaviour.
Since the beginnig his real school is the contemporary world, rich in stimulus and images that reveals itself in the paintings as stratification, clear in the use of different materials in the first works related to the emotions dripping, to become now a plurality of subjects as in the painting Stop and stylistic variations that produce a mix of expressions of different stories, such as Il guerriero innamorato and La signora che raccoglieva stelle cadenti.
The absolute absence of any perspective, the figurative elements, the frontal vision, a style that recalls the star without atmosphere of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the American neoexpressionism, but that always keeps the artist's unmistakable distinguishing mark, make his paintings La donna amantide and Una canzone per lei full of restless energy,
which associated with the colour, releases a confidential sense of lightness.
This exhibition leads also an emotional neoexpressionism, a group of seemingly simple symbols, codes and signs that sometimes epitomizes real ghosts of the past and the present, making the painted moment part of a story.
Such Andrea's pictorial period may be considered the beginning of a new poetic project that concerns subjects of our faster and faster hypermodern society, that has been object of a time reversal. He perceives, as Il pensatore che vaga, a new way of living the time, a new rhythm of life imposed by the revolution of the new communication technologies. Everything must be fast and straightaway, the consequence is, on one hand, a demand of immediacy, an immediate reply and, on the other hand, immediacy within everybody's reach, as to the Pescatore's patience if connected to the net, and permitted by economy. The coming of this, unexpected but packaged ad hoc, marks new ways of living the time that expresses itself into a continuous acceleration that beats the rythm of the society between dream and reality.
Another painted meditation comes from the work Generic Man by Jana Sterbak that photographically portrays a man's nape where a bar code is tattoed, symbol of homologation and standardization of physical identity that preludes the absence of human identity.
In Giusti this subject, obvious reference to the impossibility of being really free in our social system, is represented in the paintings Occhi and Tre sono le cose buone by the introduction of numbers, eyes and faces, synonymous of crisis of identity and loss of sense.
Another reference is what the title of Il curioso evokes. This reacalls the idea of wonder that is typical of the philosopher and philosophy, as Platone says in Teeto through Socrate: “ And it's typical of the philosopher what you feel, to be full of wonder, philosophizing has this beginning and no other”.
In L'angelo dallo specchio magico he tells simply, through the colours, his mood that imitates, understands and shares a person's behaviour as it were a mirror that reflects and gives you experience. An experience that makes you feel your way of being and stimulates the realization without any words and gives you tha pleasant sensation of tranquillity.
Finally, Andrea paints heart greetings to the poetess Alda Merini, a sensitive and melancholy woman rather isolated and not much understood, that refers to the transport of the art, ut pictura poësis, in the painting as in the poetry, where the most important thing is what you have in your mind and immediately after you do. Living and painting the present, fishing epiphanies, because no other time exists except this wonderful moment.
Fishing epiphanies is a travel through Andrea Giusti's time vortex that shows, in his paintings exposed at Villa Schiff-Giorgini at Montignoso, a new attitude from him and an unusual predisposition for the support, the colours and the represented themes.
Recently he has decided to paint on wood or cardboard, leaving for the moment the canvas aside. He immediately explains to me that it's a different choice because on the canvas the colours are absorbed more slowly and so they lightly lose their intensity. While on wood or cardboard the colour is immediately absorbed and you can rapidly pass on another colour where there is a clear detachment, clearly evident in his work. The brush stroke is swifter and it slides with more agility making much clearer and much more definite the pictorial sign such as in the painting Un re senza cuore.
He is aware of using a poor material compared to the canvas, which always implies a certain sacredness. Wood or cardboard have got particular features that canvas doesn't offer such as the immediate gesture that doesn't allow much afterthought and let you use both acrylic colours and felt-tip pens, important for doodling and writing as children do. They make lively, unexpected and instinctive the sign left on the surface, recognizable in Strani compagni di gioco and Tu puoi.
This manner for Giusti is essential because the act seems almost anticipate the concept as well as he used to do in his period of emotions dripping, when his unconscious guided his hand and his subject were shaped by what his mood, connected parallely with his unconscious, his soul and his heart, was dectating in that particular moment.
Andrea's painting, as he writes on his notebook, is nothing else that the game of his emotions that play with the colours and, between a brush stroke and the other one, run and run after each other on wood or cardborad, until exhausted finally they fall asleep and everything is silent, leaving a charm and a fine memory of that game.
Some of his writings are represented in his paintings by verses, words, numbers, syncopated protests, exisistential statements that attest a continuous stream of thought and they are the most direct means to be in the world and to relate to it. His pictorial subjects reveal themselves as “epiphanies” that return something already known and metabolized to our imaginary, as inner fragments that are deciphered by the colours.
When Andrea paints, he perceives his mood as a special moment in which any person, object and situation of common life becomes revelation of the real meaning of his living. It's here that he fishes, in the stream of consciousness, the connections that mingle in his existence, lived as map, and in the world, lived as territory.
So fishing epiphanies becomes for Giusti a way to represent with colours the associations of ideas that, showing in the continuous stream of consciousness, assume more and more that verism of thought which gives sense and value to our behaviour.
Since the beginnig his real school is the contemporary world, rich in stimulus and images that reveals itself in the paintings as stratification, clear in the use of different materials in the first works related to the emotions dripping, to become now a plurality of subjects as in the painting Stop and stylistic variations that produce a mix of expressions of different stories, such as Il guerriero innamorato and La signora che raccoglieva stelle cadenti.
The absolute absence of any perspective, the figurative elements, the frontal vision, a style that recalls the star without atmosphere of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the American neoexpressionism, but that always keeps the artist's unmistakable distinguishing mark, make his paintings La donna amantide and Una canzone per lei full of restless energy,
which associated with the colour, releases a confidential sense of lightness.
This exhibition leads also an emotional neoexpressionism, a group of seemingly simple symbols, codes and signs that sometimes epitomizes real ghosts of the past and the present, making the painted moment part of a story.
Such Andrea's pictorial period may be considered the beginning of a new poetic project that concerns subjects of our faster and faster hypermodern society, that has been object of a time reversal. He perceives, as Il pensatore che vaga, a new way of living the time, a new rhythm of life imposed by the revolution of the new communication technologies. Everything must be fast and straightaway, the consequence is, on one hand, a demand of immediacy, an immediate reply and, on the other hand, immediacy within everybody's reach, as to the Pescatore's patience if connected to the net, and permitted by economy. The coming of this, unexpected but packaged ad hoc, marks new ways of living the time that expresses itself into a continuous acceleration that beats the rythm of the society between dream and reality.
Another painted meditation comes from the work Generic Man by Jana Sterbak that photographically portrays a man's nape where a bar code is tattoed, symbol of homologation and standardization of physical identity that preludes the absence of human identity.
In Giusti this subject, obvious reference to the impossibility of being really free in our social system, is represented in the paintings Occhi and Tre sono le cose buone by the introduction of numbers, eyes and faces, synonymous of crisis of identity and loss of sense.
Another reference is what the title of Il curioso evokes. This reacalls the idea of wonder that is typical of the philosopher and philosophy, as Platone says in Teeto through Socrate: “ And it's typical of the philosopher what you feel, to be full of wonder, philosophizing has this beginning and no other”.
In L'angelo dallo specchio magico he tells simply, through the colours, his mood that imitates, understands and shares a person's behaviour as it were a mirror that reflects and gives you experience. An experience that makes you feel your way of being and stimulates the realization without any words and gives you tha pleasant sensation of tranquillity.
Finally, Andrea paints heart greetings to the poetess Alda Merini, a sensitive and melancholy woman rather isolated and not much understood, that refers to the transport of the art, ut pictura poësis, in the painting as in the poetry, where the most important thing is what you have in your mind and immediately after you do. Living and painting the present, fishing epiphanies, because no other time exists except this wonderful moment.
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