Gianluca Di Pasquale / Michel Grillet
Mostra doppia personale
Comunicato stampa
We are pleased to announce the first exhibition in Switzerland by the Italian painter Gianluca Di Pasquale.
His first works on canvas were landscape paintings composed almost only by figures, painted with precise brush strokes inside a large white space. Apart from some people, a few trees, some architectural details, there was nothing but white canvas. Yet in the imagination the immaculate space becomes mountains, sea, a square or a street. The scenarios are those of our leisure time: ski slopes, parks, trails, large urban squares, beaches - places of encounter and mediation between nature and civilization, where people aggregate, creating rhythms and constellations dictated by the forms of the landscape.
In some more recent works the female figure becomes the main actor of the scene. But these mysterious women are shown from behind, making it impossible to ascertain their identity. We thus find ourselves observing a series of backs of women wearing garments with floral or abstract motifs. The further we delve into these intricate textures, the more we find ourselves immersed in an unknown, abstract pictorial landscape.
Immaculate white returns as a characteristic feature of Di Pasquales compositions, ready to host the female bodies and floral elements in an absolute, delicate space. This operation itself becomes painting. The white canvas is transformed into the scenario in which the figures orbit, captured in the banality of everyday gestures, seemingly intent upon a sort of cosmic soliloquy. At the same time, as often in Di Pasquales paintings, its the persons who create the space, and even the landscape.
In his most recent paintings, developed after a journey to Vietnam, the artist evokes some atmospheres typical of Indochine, in the way he has always imagined it. Echos of the imagination and pre-existing images combine with recent memories. The landscapes are seen as in a daydream. Nearly always starting with a photographic image, that he uses as daily notes, Di Pasquale re-creates with painting images pre-existing in his own imagination.
Gianluca Di Pasquale was born in Rome in 1971. He lives and works in Milano.
Project Room: Michel Grillet
The mountain chains unfolding in Michel Grillet's watercolors possess a floating lightness. In gradations of blue and grey darker silhouettes thrust themselves in front of the summits that seem to fade into the distance. The miniaturized panorama format suggests an endless, unobstructed landscape, but at the same time avoids providing a fixed reading. The flowing lines and coloured areas resemble the idea of a mountain much more than an actual mountain range. They are archetypal impressions, pictures of memories in the flow of time.
Since 30 years Grillet creates watercolors and ink drawings with a precise vocabulary, painting sky and mountains, water and stars, distilling the essence of the landscape, in order to put the elements into an ongoing dialogue with each other. With this he consciously creates a clear frame for himself, to pose questions about painting, landscape, picture and image without the intrusion of illusionary details. Grillet paints from memory, the remembered mountains become pure painterly events, which immediately make clear that a painting consisting of a combination of colors on a surface that, in its completely different reality, can only conditionally resemble what is represented. In their reduction to the essential, to calm and timeless presence, these landscapes, detached from the contingency of the world, make visible what lies beyond random appearances.
