Piacenza, a baroque church houses recent and unpublished works and historical works by Omar Galliani

From April 23 to September 24, 2022, the Piccolo Museo della Poesia Chiesa di San Cristoforo in Piacenza, which is housed in a Baroque church frescoed by Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, hosts the exhibition Ab Umbra Lumen. Galliani meets Bibiena, curated by Massimo Silvotti, in collaboration with LABiennale POESIA e oltre, of which the museum is a founding member.

The exhibition project is a kind of bi-personal, in which, thanks to a large refractive platform, the paintings and frescoes double and everything is reversed and multiplied. The exhibition includes about fifteen works by Omar Galliani, scattered inside the church and in the adjoining premises of theOratory of St. Christopher, home to the Library of Contemporary Poetry. A selection of recent large-scale paintings can be seen in the church, including the three previously unpublished Botany of Faith (2022), Litany of the Heart (2022) and Beyond the Cross (2022), while the Library displays a number of historical works on panel and on paper that illustrate the artist’s journey. Omar Galliani meets inside the church with the author of the dome fresco, Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, in a kind of dialogue.

“Shadow that illuminates, light that overshadows. We are in the Oratory of San Cristoforo and already this Bibiena dome where height is depth, disorients us,” writes curator Massimo Silvotti. “Everything is precipitous, yet firm, mighty, marble-like. And the sumptuousness of the Baroque, which also encircles us with laurels, appears out of home, bewildered. The church is a theater, prayer, a soprano’s treble. It is here that Galliani, also Baroque in his own way, grafts in by subtraction. He leads our gaze to vibrant details, where it would seem that everything begins. The darkness rekindles and the blacks or grays, undressing of their opacity invite us to a jolt of life. A whisper is heard in the distance, resembling a call, an echo. The solemnity of silence.”

“Galliani is one of the few contemporary artists who have reevaluated and practiced what the classical eras considered the most important art, indeed the very essence of art,” comments Elena Pontiggia, who wrote critical contributions in the catalog together with Giovanni Gazzaneo. “In a world where everything is virtual, drawing is still the art of the hand, of the wrist, of homo faber. Drawing, with its shadows and counterpoints, its gradations and nuances, its never shouted and never flamboyant expressive tones, is one of the artistic techniques most capable of speaking through hints and allusions, that is, of revealing. It is precisely this slow, millimetric, patient, reticent, retractable, introverted, subcutaneous technique that is capable of saying what strictly speaking cannot. [...] Galliani’s painting is metaphysical not because he paints mannequins and alienated squares, like de Chirico, but because he draws everything in the light, indeed in the darkness, of an infinite mystery.”

“In his art,” Giovanni Gazzaneo concludes, “Omar Galliani aspires to an infinite drawing, but before it is borderless it is timeless. He does not consume himself in the obsession of the present. It does not mirror itself in the noble past. Galliani’s art is open to the irruption of the Beyond, it is a poignant search for beauty. A beauty that you do not expect and that surprises you. It was not there before. Or perhaps it announced itself as a dream. More: as hope. Here it becomes face, heart, landscape, flower, stars, crown of thorns....”

On the occasion of the exhibition, it is also possible to see the collection of the Small Museum of Poetry Church of St. Christopher, which consists of unpublished poems, autographed letters, rare poetry books, rare literary journals, installations, paintings, sculptures, and works of visual, linear, concrete poetry. Inside the Oratory of St. Christopher is a well-stocked library of contemporary and other Italian and international poetry.

The exhibition is made possible with the support of Banca di Piacenza, Fondazione di Piacenza e Vigevano and Confindustria Piacenza, with the support of the Diocese of Piacenza and Bobbio, Fondazione Crocevia, Fondazione Donatella Ronconi - Enrica Prati, Piacenza musei in rete and Quotidiano Libertà.

The Piccolo Museo della Poesia Chiesa di San Cristoforo will be open to the public from April 23 to July 30, 2022 and from September 3 to 24, 2022 from Thursday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; closed in August. Full admission 7 euros, reduced 5 euros (under 18 and over 65).

For info: www.museopoesia.it

Photo by Carlo Vannini

Piacenza, a baroque church houses recent and unpublished works and historical works by Omar Galliani

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