Julien Friedler's solo exhibition "Mapping" opens in Palermo

The Sant’Elia Foundation in Palermo is organizing, from June 7 to July 7, 2020, the exhibition Mapping, a solo show of Belgian artist Julien Friedler(Brussels, 1950).

Mapping encompasses 200 recent paintings by Friedler, with a clear expressionistic approach, made in the last two years: curated by Gianluca Marziani and Dominique Stella, it takes place in the spaces of the Loggiato San Bartolomeo, headquarters of the Foundation, but it also has a more distant emanation, at Palazzo Libera, in the municipality of Villa Lagarina (Trento), in collaboration with the MART in Rovereto.

Julien Friedler is a singular figure on the contemporary art scene. His literary past, his training as a psychoanalyst, his love for philosophy and the writing of several erudite works, but also his taste for travel and encounters with different and distant realities, have composed a labyrinthine personality that finds in the visual arts an emblematic realization hypothesis.

“Of Julien Friedler we know the lush oeuvre in which paintings, sculptures and installations are spokesmen for an overflowing imaginary, visible signs of a truth between legend and myth that the artist develops through themes close to him in terms of experience and ethical commitment,” writes curator Gianluca Marziani. Mapping aims to introduce to an imaginary cartography that establishes, through countless drawings and paintings, the contours of a mental territory that Friedler traces in total expressive freedom. Colors, patches, marks and graffiti invade the surface of the canvas in a harmony that is meant to be soothing, like a return to the essential. Sensitive and impalpable impressions arise from the pictorial matter and are defined in vaporous and colorful atmospheres, liberating and cathartic.

In the Mapping series, the visual form transcends many aesthetic typicalities, along a quest that harkens back to philosophical and spiritual issues, as well as to moral themes that painting has been concerned with since the early twentieth century. Friedler’s world is intuitive, and his art, intrinsically linked to a mental attitude, is the expressive form of an inner contemplation and life experience, transfigured within the experience of painting. The paintings are the core of a meditation that materializes in color, and the work becomes a “conjunction of opposites, a paradoxical writing, an inscription of the flows through the Spirit,” as Friedler himself writes in The Truth of the Labyrinth.

Born in 1950 in Brussels, Julien Friedler is a contemporary writer and artist. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Brussels. After studying philosophy and ethnology, he took a course in psychoanalysis in Paris. He adheres to the post-structuralist theories of Jacques Lacan. In the 1990s he created “La Moire” in Brussels, an institute that promotes an interdisciplinary approach in psychoanalysis. He wants to break the constraints of classical psychoanalysis. He started as an artist in 1997. Self-taught but endowed with a great deal of experience about human character and a fascination with the unknown, Friedler began painting. The events of the second half of the 20th century influenced his sensibility and understanding of the world. Through his art, he confronts contemporary postmodern society. Today he continues to create and write. He is the founding president of the Spirit of Boz association, which works for the creation of a collective work and defends contemporary art in all its forms.

For all information you can visit the official website of the Sant’Elia Foundation. The catalog, which brings together the entire Mapping production, will be published by La Route de la Soie Éditions (Paris).

Pictured: Julien Friedler, Paysage (2019), acrylic on canvas, 120x140 cm

Julien Friedler's solo exhibition "Mapping" opens in Palermo

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