Pietrasanta, Giovanni Ricci-Novara and Ozmo interpret art masterpieces

Della bellezza e di altri demoni (Of beauty and other demons ) is the title of the exhibition featuring photographs by Giovanni Ricci-Novara and paintings by Ozmo (aka Gionata Gesi), which opens in Pietrasanta at The Project Space - ex Marmi via Nazario Sauro 52 on Saturday, Dec. 11 (at 5 p.m., the vernissage in the presence of the artists with a pictorial performance on black marble). The exhibition, curated by Annalisa Bugliani and Alessandro Romanini, compares two artists, a photographer, Giovanni Ricci-Novara, and a street art artist, Ozmo, who investigate art from two very different perspectives but with a point of contact: the representation of artistic masterpieces of the past and present.

“Two cultured artists,” explain curators Annalisa Bugliani and Alessandro Romanini, “brought together with their works in Pietrasanta, home of the homo faber and forge of beauty in solid form, who make painting and photography tools of investigation of the existing and the act of looking and metalinguistic reflection, probing with their respective media, the declinations of beauty. Ricci-Novara and Ozmo, clearly testify to how even the technological medium, which ”writes with light,“ becomes a nimble brush to illustrate aspects of beauty unfathomable by the simple gaze and how even the originally more militant and iconoclastic expressive dynamics of painting (street art), know how to converse in a peculiar way, with the harmony of composition and form. Beauty and the concept of the classical, continue to nourish our gaze and our minds and act as a defensive bulwark against the pervasive shower of baseless images, characteristic of our age; at this precise conceptual juncture, as the artists demonstrate with their works, the aesthetic dimension, becomes ethical.”

Six photographs and five paintings constitute an exhibition path where the artists confront the past and bend it into their respective languages. As is the case in Ricci-Novara’s photograph titled Without Pieta, which revisitsMichelangelo’s masterpiece. “The choice of the Pieta,” suggests the photographer, “an icon of Christian-Catholic culture, should therefore not be understood as a premeditated provocative and blasphemous intent, but as an attempt to show that the meaning of things is always in the balance. The inclusion or suppression of a detail can radically distort its meaning.” Also by Ricci-Novara, there is no shortage of references to the blindfolded faces of Mitoraj with whom the photographer had an important and fruitful collaboration. With Ozmo, the classic is decomposed, takes other paths, and climbs into chromatic experimentation, the synthesis of an artist who was born with street art but has been able to maintain firm stylistic roots matured at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.

The exhibition is open until Jan. 30, 2022, Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Free admission with green pass and mask required. The exhibition is organized by The Project Space Pietrasanta in collaboration with Etra Galleria Tommasi and Enoteca Marcucci, Fucina d’Arte.

Image: left, Giovanni Ricci Novara, Without Pity. Right, Ozmo, Apoxyomenos.

Pietrasanta, Giovanni Ricci-Novara and Ozmo interpret art masterpieces

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