In Città di Castello, drawing master Omar Galliani confronts Raphael

From Sept. 18 to Nov. 18, 2021, the Galleria delle Arti in Città di Castello (Perugia), founded in 1976 by Luigi Amadei, presents the solo exhibition of Omar Galliani (Montecchio Emilia, 1954) entitled From and for Raphael, with a text by Italo Tomassoni.

It is an unprecedented confrontation between two artists in their early twenties: on the one hand the Urbino master, who in his youth, in 1504, worked on the Wedding of the Virgin for Lodovico Albizzini in the San Giuseppe chapel of the Church of San Francesco in Città di Castello (a painting now housed in the Pinacoteca di Brera), and on the other, the master of Italian drawing, who in his years at the Academy of Fine Arts was inspired by the divine painter, seduced by the “despotic transcendence of an inaccessible and unattainable beauty,” with particular reference to the Portrait of a Lady with Unicorn in the Galleria Borghese.

“Galliani,” writes Italo Tomassoni, "treasures that image, takes it out of context and entrusts it to the dialogical magic of his drawing. Inspired by that perfection and driven by an instinctive short-circuit, he creates, starting in ’77, a compositional sequence that he entitles From and for Raphael in which beauty opens the crossed paths of seduction and removal. That beauty, which exalts distance from the 20th century, reveals the energy and fascination of a past that has never died out. What does Raphael bring as a gift to the world with the happiness of his Madonnas, his Saints, his blue or purple cloaks? - Omar Galliani asks. He brings the ecstasy of beauty to mirror itself on itself in the earthly desire to defeat the horror, the ancestral wound between Good and Evil of which we are victims in time. The wager of beauty has its beginning and epilogue in him. In those Academy years my drawings in the double contact or the unicorn blade wounding a drawing sought a revenge, a revival of that ancient wager in the present."

The Gallery of the Arts, which had already promoted two unpublished projects dedicated to Raphael in 1983 and 2020, continues this path with the exhibition of a selection of youthful works by Omar Galliani, never presented before, all made between 1977 and 1983. Works in which one can recognize the seed of an unmistakable research, extremely poetic and evocative, which has brought and continues to bring Italian art and culture to the world.

“The artist’s creative passion,” Tomassoni concludes, "settled to give figure to the saturated space of modernity. He confronted the reality of the present with history, without allowing the rules of form to be reduced to an academic system and letting distant representations intersect without ever eliding. As in the sequence of By and for Raphael, Galliani’s work proves that every image feeds on multiplicity. And it also shows how every image is never separable from a multiplicity that is in perennial contact with history."

The exhibition, produced under the patronage of the City of Città di Castello, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio Città di Castello, Rotary Club Città di Castello and Petruzzi Editore, will be open daily 10:30 a.m.-1 p.m. and 4:30-7:30 p.m. Free admission. For information: T. +39 0758558918, M. +39 337 639963, info@galleriadellearti.net, www.galleriadellearti.net. For more on Omar Galliani’s work: www.omargalliani.com.

Image: Omar Galliani, By and for Raphael (1977; pencil on paper, 540 x 370 mm)

In Città di Castello, drawing master Omar Galliani confronts Raphael

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