06 21 – 07 11 2018
curated by Maria Rosaria Gallo
Gallery 555, in collaboration with Pramantha Arte, on June 21st at 6.00 pm presents the double solo exhibition of Italian artists Luigi Magli and Francomà entitled: SPIRITUAL ANIMAL. TOTEM AND TABOO, curated by Maria Rosaria Gallo. The exhibition introduces to the Lithuanian public the paths of two of the most significant artists of the contemporary South Italy scene. Stylistically polarized, biographically brothers, Luigi Magli and Francomà have digested the contemporary artistic adventure with an experimental spirit, arriving at different expressive solutions, but sharing the same origin in abstract expressionism and primitivism. Between the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties they were among the protagonists of the group called “I Post-meridionali”, characterized by the original Calabrian contribution to avant-garde research. Today they are polarized on two stylistic extremes.
“Francomà has found his expressive home in painting. A figurative painting in which instinct, reason and imagination converge. Perception, abstraction and narration. A kind of painting that, with Gilles Deleuze, we could define as figural, in which the artist – through stories, allegories, rebuses – explores, codifies and decodes the aesthetic language bringing out all its expressive and symbolic power. Luigi Magli experiences art as pure empirical practice; a mysterious process in which to intercept, investigate and reproduce the dynamics of an original creativity. Here the pictorial space goes beyond the informal and takes on the sense of a topographic of the inspiration. A place of reunification with the original sources of poetic energy that results in the production of spatial textures, agglomerations of matter, archaic pictograms. Here art itself becomes a symbol.
From the evident formal opposition of the two artists, however, a point of contact emerges: the revival of an atavistic sensitivity; an aesthetic of feeling that palpitates with primordial instinct and tells the secret soul of things. An aesthetic in which the eye exists in its wild state, suspends conventions, affects the unconscious and reveals the presence of the human as a spiritual animal.
Through Luigi Magli and Francomà’s works, SPIRITUAL ANIMAL. TOTEM AND TABOO is the exhibition that tells an idea of art that deletes the boundaries between man and his world. It deletes the rigidity that contrasts the sentient subject with the represented and organized reality. It shows a truth rooted in the mystery of sensitivity, of matter, of color, of gesture, of sign, of vision, of desire, of dream and of word. And it does so by following a double trend.
With Luigi Magli, the piece becomes a totem. A kind of symbolic entity of profound processes in which the vibrating power of matter meets the artist’s hallucinated nose and, on the way of the absolute case, fragments of ancestral spaces and archetypes of human-animal nature born.
With Francomà, painting reveals the taboo. From a creative process that plays on the limit between rational and irrational; from a combination of brushstrokes that perform the interaction between conscious and unconscious, the pictorial story reveals the unspeakable essence of reality.
In an article written in the forties, Barnett Newman supported the idea that “the first man was an artist”, meaning that art responds to primordial spiritual needs. Luigi Magli and Francomà seem to say that the artist is a demon who, responding to the impulse of creative obsession, discovers primordial man, turns out to be a spiritual animal.”*
*From the text by Maria Rosaria Gallo