A cat on the Aurelia: Fausto Gilberti's intervention for the Aurelia→SUD project.

A new stage, the seventh, for the Aurelia→SUD project conceived by artist Gabriele Landi in his studio at Via Aurelia Sud 19 in Arcola (La Spezia), which periodically sees its sign made by renowned artists on a light box measuring 355x67 cm. From Thursday, Dec. 8 to Sunday, Feb. 5, 2023, the intervention created as part of a project by Fausto Gilberti, winner of the Cairo Prize in 2007, who created a work entitled Aurelia Loves Cats, will be on view.

The image, a lying figure with a cat on its belly, was inspired to Gilberti by the elongated shape of the Lightbox: it is one of the typical “little men” of the Brescian artist, with a cat to catch the eye. It is a sort of ironic reinterpretation of Johann Heinrich Füssli’sNightmare, but according to Gabriele Landi, who curates all the interventions, also a work that implies an animalistic intent, the Via Aurelia being a major road from which cats are better off staying away (so much so that on the Tuscan coast, especially in the area from Carrara to Livorno, it is now common to say “last like a cat on the Aurelia” to refer to something that is very short-lived). “It occurs to me that the work, when it is not merely didactic, but rather, evocative ... manages to suggest different readings,” Gilberti explained.

Fausto Gilberti (Brescia, 1970) is a painter, illustrator and author of children’s books. He studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and began exhibiting his works in the late 1990s. His creations are figures reduced to a minimum, stylized characters with large, dazed eyes that stand out on blank sheets in which the setting is almost always undefined. Winner of the 2004 Acacia Makes You Fly Prize and the 2007 Cairo Prize, he has a hundred or so solo and group exhibitions both in Italy and abroad to his credit. He has published numerous illustrated books in recent years, almost all published by Corraini. Among the most recent are Il circo del nano e della donna barbuta (2018) and Yayoi Kusama (2019). She lives in Brescia where she works drawing day and night over a table that was used to make pork salami.

The Aurelia→SUD project has so far featured interventions by Mario Consiglio, Loredana Longo, Luca Pancrazzi, Serena Fineschi, Iginio De Luca, Luca Quartana, and Luca Scarabelli.

A cat on the Aurelia: Fausto Gilberti's intervention for the Aurelia→SUD project.

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