Torino, Torino

In 2004, the Tucci Russo Gallery hosted Gianni Caravaggio’s first solo exhibition, entitled CAUSE, in Torre Pellice. The collaboration with the artist has continued over the years and the current exhibition is the fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. With the exhibition e mentre il fiume scorre (and while the river flows) Gianni Caravaggio for the first time displays his works in the Tucci Russo Gallery - Chambres d’Art in Turin, at Via Davide Bertolotti 2.

 

While the stars move away from us and at the same time seem to fall like snowballs, while the sun daily deceptively appears to rise or set on the horizon and while the river flows near us, three snakes in the space of the gallery shine with a different silver and draw closer to each other from different rectilinear trajectories to form a triangle (biting each other); but in the other room, as in a parallel space-time, we see the same scene a few moments later: the snakes have missed each other;  they haven’t bitten each other, they haven’t formed any geometric figure and they are continuing their journey around the globe so they can meet again in the same place. They ask themselves ‘will we miss each other again?’.

Hoping for company, the Ouroboro no longer lingers in solitude with time.

Meanwhile, in the middle of the two parallel spaces, a shower of confetti, which has just fallen from above, leaving holes in the paper sky, weighs down on an icy-looking cylinder. Like a giant ‘Calippo’, it gives way and slowly melts under the festive weight. But all this comes to a standstill because the ice is stone: a melancholic ephemeral still image of a Happy heavy winter.

 

Not far away, a triptych of drawings, like the silhouettes of three curtains thrown wide open, reveal three moments of cosmic time. Three wondering gazes open the theatre of reality for a moment; the openness can have the face of a rainy day seen from the window.

 

The river flowing outside the gallery is an integral part of the works on display, like a natural ready-made for the duration of the exhibition.

 

More than the sensation of an instantaneous presence with which objects often invest our perception, the works push the imagination to compensate for an entire temporal flow, evoking the hope-filled feeling of cyclical repetition, or that of inexorably escaping towards an uncertain destiny. The object itself is not the aesthetic protagonist but rather an agent of an event that is still happening as we contemplate the moment it appears, as though in a freeze-frame: a visible moment of the entire flow of the invisible event. It is the entire flow of the event that becomes aesthetic in our perception.

 

 

Gianni Caravaggio

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Gianni Caravaggio (Rocca San Giovanni, 1968) lives and works in Milan and Sindelfingen (Germany). He has participated in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including: GAM, Turin, 2023; Kunstmuseum, Reutlingen, 2021; Museo Novecento, Florence, 2018; double-venue exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Saint-Étienne and MAGA, Gallarate, 2014; Izmir Triennale, 2010; Collezione Maramotti, 2008; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2006; Moscow Biennale, 2005; Casa degli artisti di Milano, 1997. In 2013 he receives the ACACIA award, in 2005 the Castello di Rivoli and Alinovi awards and in 2002 the Fondo Speciale PS1 Italian Studio Program award.