Saturday 5 June at 7.00 pm inaugurates the exhibition season of the Giovanni Bonelli Gallery in Pietrasanta with Private Mythologies, a bi-personal exhibition of the painters Chiara Calore (Abano Terme, 1994) and Giuseppe Gonella (Motta di Livenza, 1984), curated by Carlo Sala space by Nazario Sauro 56, an example of industrial recovery just outside the walls, in the street that runs along the access to the city.
On display twenty works including paintings, sculptures and mixed techniques that let the viewer enter the pictorial universe of artists made up of visual archetypes, recurring figures, personal mythologies and deep moods.
In Chiara Calore's paintings there are constantly changing contexts where the animal world merges with the plant one and the human figure is linked to the transcendent. We are faced with a pictorial magma in which allusions to classical painting and ancient idols are combined with a contemporary imaginary made up of vernacular images drawn from the net; all conceived with the typical narrative taste of fairy tales, myths and biblical stories. The events that we see in Calore's works seem to want to destabilize the precarious balance of reality, thus revealing a sort of fable-like narrative made up of sudden epiphanies where the common denominator is the encounter between the earthly and celestial elements. In the painting DAMA and horse (2021) the features of the admirable dress of the protagonist of the painting Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez are recalled, subverting its austerity and placing the girl on a horse of disproportionate size: the two figures seem thus merge and give life to a centaur placed in a scenario with grotesque contours. The painting The plot of Lana (2021) is enriched with large portions of materials sewn by the artist who, while using recycled materials, manages to recall the skill and beauty of the finishes of ancient tapestries. In his case, however, the figure against the scene does not have the celebratory intent of traditional compositions, and on the contrary wants to convey an alienating feeling to the viewer. To close the artist's intervention are a series of small sculptures set up to create a personal Wunderkammer composed of curious characters poised between irony, ecstasy and madness.
Giuseppe Gonella presents a series of large canvases where the landscape takes on a particular value, becoming the expressive theater of a whole series of human tensions. In the painting Under the Skin of the Sea (2020) the painter represents a seabed that appears as an unknown abyss, full of charm and mystery. A whirlwind of colors in which to make your way in search of that sense of the sublime that the philosopher Immanuel Kant defined as a "continuous wonder". An idea of ​​perennial motion, physical and inner, also underlies the work Path of the Gods (2020) where the human figures in the dynamics of the journey seem to interpenetrate with the vegetation of the territory, creating a suspended and rarefied reality. The work The Surprise (2018/20) refers to a Nordic scenario made up of glaciers, volcanoes and snow-capped mountains where the colors of dawn are the background to the encounter between a man and a woman: they are two modern figures, but in them there is all the charge of the myth, as if they were the new Helen and Paris who find themselves following various travails of life. On display are also a selection of portraits where the faces of the protagonists appear as the "battlefields" of painting: the mimesis of female figures is first outlined, only to be altered, and at times denied, generating a marked formal tension. Among these stands out the work Traum eines Frühlingsmorgens (2018/19) inspired by the poem Dream of a spring morning (1897) by Gabriele D'Annunzio: in Gonella's work the same sentiment of the narrative work is expressed by combining in a single figure love, madness, death and rebirth through a vigorous painting that transposes the female face, charging it with a melancholy pathos and a tragic tension.
Chiara Calore (Abano Terme, 1994), lives and works in Venice. She was a fellow at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice. Among his personal shows Io èaltra (with Greta Ferretti), D3082, Venice; Locus Amoenus and Genesi at Villa Draghi in Montegrotto Terme, Speculum Mundi at Galleria Davide Gallo in Milan. Among the group exhibitions Danae Revisited, Fabbri Foundation, Pieve di Soligo; Milano Vetro at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan; Live work at the Bevilacqua La Masa Venice Foundation; High Density at the Magazzini del Sale in Venice: the Mestre Painting Award at the Candiani Cultural Center in Mestre; Laboratory opened in Forte Marghera, Venice Mestre; Biennale Giovani Trento, Piedicastello Galleries, Trentino Historical Museum Foundation, Trento.
Giuseppe Gonella (Motta di Livenza, 1984) lives and works in Berlin. Among the main solo exhibitions: Diptych, MAC Contemporary Art Museum, Lissone; Chasing lights, Giovanni Bonelli Gallery, Milan; Walking Home, Magic Beans Gallery, Berlin; Local Mind, The atlas / Der Blitz, MAG Galleria Civica G. Segantini, Arco; De aeterno reditu, Egbert Baquè Contemporary Art, Berlin; Involved, Giovanni Bonelli Gallery, Milan; No place left to hide, Casa dei Carraresi, Treviso; Suspended oscillation, Senart 284, New York. Among the main group exhibitions we remember the participation in: Praestigium / Imago mundi, Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin; Sommer frische Kunst, Bad Gastein; Map of New Art / Imago mundi, Luciano Benetton Collection, Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice; Intersections, Egbert Baquè Contemporary Art, Berlin; XV. Cairo Award, Palazzo della Permanente, Milan; (S) innehalten. Sense (s), l'Espace de l'Espace HB55, Berlin; In absentia, Correggio Museum - Palazzo dei Principi, Correggio; 54. Venice Biennale, Italian Pavilion at the Exhibition Palace, Turin. He has participated in various exhibitions at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice, winning a prize and the assignment of an atelier.
This page is translated using Google translation. Please note that the content may not be 100% accurate.