Sergio Ragalzi / Van Oost

Doppio solo-show di Jan van oost | The Demon Love e Sergio Ragalzi | Madre_Oro.

Comunicato stampa

JAN VAN OOST | THE DEMON LOVE

opening reception : December 15. 2012 | 18 h

GALERIE | ROLANDO ANSELMI

Galerie Rolando Anselmi is pleased to announce The Demon Love, the first solo show of Flemish artist Jan Van Oost in the gallery space in Berlin. A selection of his major sculptures from the nineties will be displayed in the space, together with some significant drawings from the "Baudelaire" and the "De Sade-Pasolini" cycles. The artist found inspiration to his expressive language in the symbolism of Wiertz, Spilliaert and Ensor. He perceives the pervasive and imminent presence of death in the life of each one and represents it, especially in his first work, through conceptually minimal metaphors. The drawings themselves seem to be fragments of anatomy, debris of bones, of human remains scattered as if they were within the narrow edges of a coffin. This concept of the end of life, often accompanied by the ritual of pain, is central in his work and he uses it to try to overcome the condition of being mortal, facing it by skilful use of irony and analogies. Irony is inherent in almost all of his works and a complex ambiguity between horror and seduction, between reality and fantasy, characterizes his sculptural research. The realistic sculptures " Strega" (1999), and "The Knife"(2004), marked with strong humanity like memory, feeling, femininity and sexuality are at the same time, ideal of seductive female beauty and horrifying shapes, scary and intriguing, figures of the timeless confrontation between Eros and Thanatos where beauty is horror, and horror is beauty. Through different media and a dark aesthetic JanVan Oost investigates life and death, viscerally and strongly fascinated by the black holes of our mind, in search of secrets and answers, as he declared: "Art reveals things that are not usually within one’s consciousness range".

Jan Van Oost was born in Deinze (Belgium) in 1961. He lives and works in Ghent. Jan Van Oost starts his career in the mid 80’s with several public exhibitions such as the Gewad Foundation in 1985, the Vereniging voor het Museum in 1986 (Ghent), and the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneve in 1987. At the same time he starts to collaborate with some established galleries such as Xavier Hufkens in Bruxelles, Air de Paris and Albert Baronian in Nice and Paris. The most significant exhibitions in the 90’s are at Giorgio Persano in Turin and at Lucio Amelio in Naples, and his drawings for the Baudelaire cycle were presented at Museum D’Hondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, at NAC-Novara Arte Cultura and Galerie Piece Unique in Paris. He was recently exhibited at Sint Baafskathedraal in a group exhibition curated by Jan Hoet and Hans Mertens.

SERGIO RAGALZI | MADRE_ORO

opening reception : December 15. 2012 | 18 h

GALERIE | ROLANDO ANSELMI

Galerie Rolando Anselmi is pleased to announce Madre_Oro, the first solo show by artist Sergio Ragalzi in the gallery's space in Berlin. The artist will create a site-specific installation made by 30 different birdcages of different sizes and materials hanging from the ceiling and creating a visual labyrinth that the visitor is invited to cross. They're all painted in black and evoke an idea of captivity, containing almost relic-like metamorphosis of the mechanical shape of bombs, and some mutated hermaphrodite snake-like bodies. The effect of these ceramic golden creatures reaches it maximum in contrast with the deep black tone of the cages in which they're contained. An archetypal insinuation of a reliquary made sacred by gold's preciousness, as old sign of prosperity, totem of human baroque memories, and remind of today material consumerism. To quote the artist: "Exorcism of mortal objects, sacrificial, invaders of black nights, survive in a hot destructive mood as poisonous snakes. Metaphor of a social illness and of an economy melted in the unconsciousness of an existential prison". The installation will be completed by some of Ragalzi's pictorial works, part of the "Acquario" cycle, produced in the same years of the cages' installation. The cycle is characterized by two recurring elements of Sergio Ragalzi's artistic research, the bomb and the iteration, which he began to use in the mid-eighties. Subjects of his paintings are invasive clusters of bombs, minute shadows of multiply and overlapping shells, resembling the texture of an insect swarm or fishes in an aquarium. The imaginative mechanism of obsessive iteration, implicit in the swarm of bombs but also in the maze of cages allude to a psychological bombing rather than a warlike, not lethally destructive, but somehow estranging and alienating. The exhibition display an expressive work, loaded with metaphors and soaked with a black kind of humor that the artist uses as active judgment and indispensable warning of awareness.

Sergio Ragalzi was born in 1951, in Turin, where he still lives and works.
His début on the artistic Italian scene is in 1984 with Extemporanea, the exhibition which marks the re-opening of the legendary roman gallery l’Attico by Fabio Sargentini, which would dedicate to Ragalzi many personal exhibitions in the years to come. He takes part to the exhibition Anniottanta at the Modern Art Gallery in Bologna in 1985. That same year he is invited to the Museo de Arte in Sao Paulo, Brasil, and some of his works are presented at L’Italie Aujourd’hui, exhibition hosted by the Centre Nazionale d’Art Contemporain in Nice, curated by A.B. Oliva, Maurizio Calvesi, Antonio Del Guercio and Filiberto Menna. In 1986 he takes part to the Frankfurt-Hannover-Wien travelling exhibition Aspekte der Italienischen Kunst 1960/1985, curated by Renato Barilli. In 1996 his works are presented at the XII Quadriennal Art Exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. He wins the Prize awarded by the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1997. Subsequently, the Chamber purchases one of his works for the institution’s art collection and dedicates to Ragalzi a catalogue and a personal exhibition that same year. In 2001, his sculptures are presented at the exhibition Italian sculpture in the 20th-Century, Italy-Japan 2001-2002, which is hosted at the three Japanese modern art museums in Ibaraki, Yokoana and Kagoshima. An anthological exhibition is organised at the industrial premises of Pagliero, in Castellamonte (Turin), in 2007. The most significant personal exhibitions in 2008 are: Acquario at Allegretti gallery in Turin, Voliere at Delloro gallery in Rome, Due insetti neri at Rivara Castle and Pioggia Nera at Grossetti Contemporary Art in Milan. In 2010, the installation Genetica 2093, was presented at the Auditorium of Rome, at the SuperstudioPiù in Milan, at the Lucas Carrieri Art Gallery within the 6th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art, in Via Palazzo di Città in Turin and at the Castello di Rivara. In September 2010, the installation Genetica 2093 was presented at the MACRO Museum in Rome, which has acquired its ownership.