Fourteen artists lead the “challenging”-looking direction.
Dorothy Circus Gallery and Gianluca Marziani lead concepts and aesthetic crossings for the first time exhibited in a brand new exhibition space. We are in Rome, with a new generation concept-gallery that brings on clear ideas and a clear identity: to investigate specific linguistic territories, which can be oriented between Pop Surrealism and lowbrow art, between extreme figurations and independent pictorial realities. Alexandra Mazzanti and Jonathan Pannacciò keep the threads of the Gallery – two complementary souls that created this project with its thematic and curatorial sophistication. An international and antagonistic eye that will pass through the continents, following a fil rouge that represents a new and cruel beauty.
It begins with “Stories From The Wonderland”: multiple visions inside universes in which every artist finds his/her elective geography. Atmospheres, styles, the emotional and the psychoanalytic tensions change. What does not change is the artists’ will to tell us about parallel realities, different territories that belong to surrealist entities that dive into people’s minds. The external world thus becomes an impervious and unpredictable place, at the same time attractive and repulsive, a mixture of cruelty and sublime, normality and absurdity, tenderness and roughness. Day and night penetrate in each other, creating a fusion of sentiments and attitudes. Here, everything owns its double and goes even beyond that; it recalls the reality with its own rules, which are recognizable. In wonderland, appearances deceive and deceits become more important than appearances…
Wonderland becomes like the ideal place where ancestral fears, dreamlike travels, childhood archetypes, and ambitions are metabolized. Like the welcome territory for those who re-read history, daily events, small and big social dramas. Like a place beyond geography where the individual and society are fused in the moral visions of an emotional art, which is both classic and desecrating, thoughtful in its technique and its solutions, beyond the limiting bond of genres.
Stories From The Wonderland” represents a complex insertion in a painting that mirrors the most contaminated spirit of our times; various figurative hypothesis that demonstrate its visionary character and its more plausible realism. Landscapes, bodies, animals, stories, nature, objects: the world is measured through the metabolic style of the artists, everything looks similar to reality, but still you perceive suspended atmospheres, a sense of spasmodic and silent wait, of doubt and danger, of a-normal silences or strange noises approaching.
Damon Soule elevates the entropic chaos to his righteous point of surrealist summary. The compositional kinetics of his bodies splits apart and reunites in a never-ending gravitational process. Rich landscapes, animal and human bodies, objects and idols live together in a panoramic vision that reminds of movies and through sophisticated mental rhythms. There are kinetic geometries, naïve fragments, pop chromatism and a constant post-atomic feeling that unites all the events in a visionary robotic landscape. Painting becomes a flux of chemical geometry in which everything becomes particles among the mathematics of digital art. Buckminster Fuller seems to be merging with the “King’s man” Rousseau, in a renewed architecture of the world, between the apocalypse and mystery. It is the living space that pictures new simulations of the future.
Damon Soule elevates the entropic chaos to his righteous point of surrealist summary. The compositional kinetics of his bodies splits apart and reunites in a never-ending gravitational process. Rich landscapes, animal and human bodies, objects and idols live together in a panoramic vision that reminds of movies and through sophisticated mental rhythms. There are kinetic geometries, naïve fragments, pop chromatism and a constant post-atomic feeling that unites all the events in a visionary robotic landscape. Painting becomes a flux of chemical geometry in which everything becomes particles among the mathematics of digital art. Buckminster Fuller seems to be merging with the “King’s man” Rousseau, in a renewed architecture of the world, between the apocalypse and mystery. It is the living space that pictures new simulations of the future.
Kathie Olivas chooses the humanoid measure and tells unexpected stories with variable canons. Everything revolves around the archetypes of masking and of multiple personalities. Rabbits, birds, devils, skulls, astronauts and the other characters through which we discover these little post-human childish creatures, dressed in unexpected ways. Our little children have tentacles or little fins instead of arms and legs; their eyes are slanting, the gestures looks like the daily carnival belonging to a domestic normality in the hands of willing children. Around them, a desolated and dispersive landscape spreads, defining a particular space belonging to a world that has irremediably changed; a world that leaves these children alone with their freedom and civil questions about the future.
Joshua Clay throws us among the fetish women of his cruel imaginary. Aggressive and threadlike silhouettes, long dark hair, pale skin with strong make up, catchy and theatrical clothes for a dark romanticism where blood colors the atmosphere and the general feeling. Knives in the hands, intense gazes, long coats that rise like waves of fabric: Clay’s climax takes us back to the erotic culture of Skin Two and Marquis, towards magazines that enhance the poses of photographic fetish. But this is just a pretext to turn upside the fetish cult into extreme that give no recourse to the unlucky characters outfield. A series of wine and blood, Spain and old Parisian theatres, torn hearts and an elegance that strikes the viewers. Stories of women that absorb their victims.
Tim McCormick invites our eyes to listen to a nature more and more whipping. It seems like hearing the wind that skims the faces, the noise of leaves and the growth of trees where you could not imagine. Body and landscape start intertwining without rest, inside a global dynamism that mixes forms, multiplies details, and even chews sentences and works in a metabolic vortex of the world. Also the color belongs to nature, as if the brushstrokes lied on the soothing flux of the elements in action. In this landscape there are monolithic faces, compact bodies and some animals that animate the park-life of the protagonists on the scene. We still have the doubt that something won’t be like before anymore; that the world is a place for epic changing fluxes; and that the bodies are fighting (inside and outside) like never before.
Nicoletta Ceccoli invites us to dive into the whispering wind of her diaphanous characters. The daily circus inspires the fun little girls, with their big heads and very thin bodies, that look like tender snow whites in an ordinary life made of paradoxes and theatrical loneliness. The ladies fly like kites or butterflies, they explode like luxuriant flowers, they float like fragile eggs and encage birds inside bodies of crinoline… pure visionary magic where game determines the harmonic rhythm of the scene, the subtle cleverness of quotations, the atmosphere between fable and Flemish painting. According to Ceccoli, her works are little surreal tales, wings of a theatrical stage where you can listen to the morbid sound of a string instrument, the noise of nature, the feeble voice of the girls in action. These scenes represent a mixture of Jan Vermeer’s scenes and the culture of circus, united to rebuild an unexpected atmosphere.
Ahren Hertel exalts the cathartic effects of a soft painting, where interior drama evokes religious, literary, and cinematographic references. Here, too, we find young and restless adolescents and generational troubles in which everything is mixed together without an ideological boundary. A journey through the loneliness of thoughtful individuals, still in front of the indiscreet gaze that unveils their doubts, their ancestral fears, their will to fight but also their failures in front of the difficulties of ordinary life. In Hertel’s painting, there is blood flowing, in harmony with the symbolic tensions of a painting model (Pop Surrealism in general) that deals with pain, with suffering flesh and the unveiled sacred heart. Hertel speaks through her portraits and depicts the pain hidden with the honest strength of a revealed surrealism.
Andrea Ambrogio divides the image like a puzzle. The fragmentation is total, as it is the chromatic incoherence and the final look of the figurative architectures. The work acts by mimetic superimpositions, freeing memories and impulses, denounces and passions, harmonies and divergences. We find the maximalist culture of Hundertwasser and the childish instinct of Jean Dubuffet inside a clear shout typical of pop metropolis. Places, people, fantasies, but also reality is metabolized in his percussions with a tense visual rhythm. Ambrogio’s art is orgiastic in its selection and composition, diarist for personal motivations, explosive for its nature. His art is made of mad fragments, which remind us of the generosity existing in the mixture of these elements that stimulate moral thoughts.
Have a nice journey. And may marvel be ever with you.
