An exhibition-event in Verona celebrates the art of Gianluigi Colin

From May 27 to 29, 2022, the City of Verona and the Porta Palio Mutual Aid Society will open to the public a special exhibition-event, titled Where Life Found No Words, Only Silence Remains, curated by Luigi De Ambrogi, which aims to celebrate the art of Gianluigi Colin (Pordenone, 1956). The title is taken from a quote by Karl Kraus, and the exhibition brings together a corpus of about ten large canvases made specifically for the exhibition project.

The works in the exhibition reveal Colin’s different souls as an artist, art director and journalist. They are born among the matter of typographic reality; they are authentic “word rags”: the degree zero of any form of writing. Colin’s paintings are a sequence of abstract works, laden with chromatic sedimentations, repeated streaks, and dilated backgrounds in space. The particularity of this series, however, lies in the origin of these works, which highlights the personal history and conceptual root of the artist’s recent research: Colin appropriates large textiles used to clean the rotary presses of various newspapers. His are"roto-paintings," or textiles to symbolically remove world news.

The artist places the mythology of newspapers at the center of his research, reflecting on the media system, working in the dialogue between images and words and addressing the theme of the gaze and memory. From the journalist’s point of view, Colin observes the world through its becoming history starting from the endless stream of images of the daily news, which come to settle in the individual memory only after the media filter. The starting point of the investigation is precisely the iconographic heritage of our present history: he places at the center the research on the technological transformations that in recent years have changed cognitive processes, the culture of representation and, above all, the design attitude.

“In these canvases I recognize the infinite stories of an invisible humanity,” said the artist. "A memory suspended in a time that is renewed every day: faces of women and men, chronicles of painful lives superimposed on fragile tales of happiness. But here the present suddenly dissolves: it becomes formless substance, layering of colors, pure abstraction. Canvases taken from the heart of the information world that manifest themselves as secular shrouds of our time. Karl Kraus reminds us: Where life has found no words, only silence remains."

“Here in Verona in the evocative spaces of Porta Palio we hear the page, we evoke the page. Here we are in the presence of strong, marked, etched works, not like whispered news or politely displayed opinions,” commented the curator. “Here the mark of millions of words and images even of other artists are taken by Colin and are radically transformed, twisted, flayed. We hear the fighting, the hand-to-hand combat, while we hear from afar the deafening noise of the machines that we imagine even louder and more frenzied. All this and the tale of a natural transition realized within a perimeter that lies on the border between image and word and that Gianluigi Colin has fenced and chiseled to perfection.”

An exhibition-event in Verona celebrates the art of Gianluigi Colin

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