Ravenna, with the chaos of Daniele Galliano's Anything restarts the Ascoltare Bellezza program

The Ascoltare Bellezza program schedule, now in its second edition, restarts in Ravenna: opening the 2019 cycle is Daniele Galliano (Pinerolo, 1961) with his intervention Anything at the Sala del Mosaico of the Classense Library. The installation is a 200-by-310-centimeter painting, in Classese starting at 6 p.m. Wednesday, March 20.

“Daniele Galliano’s work,” says critic Eleonora Castagnone, "has been characterized from the outset by its photographic realism and a look at the everyday that ranges from the intimate and individual sphere to the public and collective expression of crowds. Galliano has been exploring the theme of crowds since the 1990s, with early paintings of raves and basements of underground clubs. From these scenes in which groups of individuals emerge adrift in the urban night, he has never abandoned this theme, deepening and declining it to the most diverse contexts, scenarios, degrees of abstraction and techniques. The Anything series represents in some ways the most recent phase of his work on crowds, with some important variations. In Anything, chaos erupts not only in the crowd, but in the very process of conception and production of the work. Here the artist acts through two main stages. The first step consists of the mechanical and casual gesture of applying tempera on canvas.After this phase of automatic painting, which generates a primordial magma of color and forms, the painter makes himself available to the apparitions that appear there and acts by going to highlight forms, characters, objects, icons. It is as if Pandora’s box, or a fissure from the cortex of the unconscious, is opened and from this channel a fair of grotesque and weird ghosts and characters, animal-totems, retro-designed cars, sprites, Martians, bishops, imams, water bowls and coffee cups, turntables as huge as dance floors, cathode ray tubes, and even Hitler and Marx spring forth. The graphic sign of the work draws on a visual heritage ranging from informal painting, hyper-realist painting, primitivism, and comics, although the narrative does not have its own syntax, but is abandoned to the very chaos from which it was generated, which itself becomes the protagonist of the work."

Daniele Galliano, a self-taught artist, began exhibiting in Turin, where he lives and works, in the early 1990s, quickly gaining a prominent place within the new Italian painting scene. His “photographic realism,” his images of places and people, soon began to be noticed beyond our borders, allowing him to participate in important solo and group exhibitions in Europe, Asia and the United States. Galliano is also one of the rare Italian art protagonists to be known to a wider audience than to insiders, and numerous collaborations with musicians, directors and writers have been made in recent years. He participated in 1992 in the XII Quadriennale in Rome, in 2006 in the Havana Biennial, in 2009 in the Venice Biennial, and in 2016 in the Kochi-Muziris Biennial. His solo shows have been held at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, Galleria In Arco in Turin, Galleria Nosei in New York and many other spaces. His works can be found at GAM in Turin, GNAM in Rome, and Mart in Trento and Rovereto. A monograph of his work was published in 2015 by Skira.

Galliano is the first of the four artists in Ascoltare Bellezza, and they are important names in Italian contemporary art: Galliano will be followed by Nanni Balestrini on June 20, Arnold Mario Dall’O on September 22, and Nicola Samorì on December 21. All exhibitions can be visited for sixty days, from 2 to 6 p.m. daily. Admission is free. More information can be found on the Ravenna City Council website.

Pictured: Daniele Galliano, Anything (2017; tempera and oil on canvas, 200 x 350 cm)

Ravenna, with the chaos of Daniele Galliano's Anything restarts the Ascoltare Bellezza program

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