March 11 – May 20, 2023

Giuseppe Barilaro solo exhibition

Blue has antiseptic, astringent, and anesthetizing properties: it is used to salve symptoms of warmth, in those moments when the blood pools in the capillaries, feverishly seeking a way to leave the body. For Barilaro, blue represents salvation while red has conquered the mind and overwhelmed it with the sacred fire of inspiration.

In a time of intimate reflection on the beauty of women and peace of mind, architectures of the Renaissance age carry the observer’s eyes up to the sky.

Blue. Elegant, with a noble past, blue appears gentle on the canvas, lowering the blood pressure, calming the breath and slowing the heartbeat. That dim light that precedes the dawn as embraced by the waves of the sea becomes itself a metaphysical representation of logos, not by chance the colour blue is even used to represent throat chakra.

Cold’s frozen patience reconciles with the old anguish of comparing oneself to the greats of the past.

Vain anabasis understood it not as an imitation of what was seen in Florence or Urbino, nor as a grotesque reference, but as the ability to identify, define, and separate what has been poisonous and harmful from what will not be.

ArtWorks that become a purifier alchemical flash, that confuse the torn wings of demons and cherubs in human miseries, testing the existing calm and the later doubt.

Abysses that are impossible to be scrutinized from the bottom, like the great mystery of the feminine principle. Here is the woman, the tutelary deity of an introspective path, between old and new paradigms of art, full of symbols, powerful but also intimate, perpetually in oscillation between the heaviest materiality and the vaguest transcendence.

The blue of the lip color after the exitus, the hagiography that pervades the backgrounds of Michelango’s Sistine Chapel.

The artist represents a society exhausted by the rape from the altarpiece, following the natural evolution of the form, and yet continuing the search for a line that can trace Giotto, Cavallini, Simone Martini, imprinting their own distinctive sign through the gash and the scratch, the flame.

The discovery and deepening of different artistic techniques born in the same Bergsonian thought that explodes in seemingly disconnected subjunctives.

The drapery of the Renaissance halls and the mysterious dresses of the ladies of the court, return in a modern key through the laceration of the material.

For this exhibition at SAC, given the majesty of the spaces, the artist intends to show all visitors an intimate, collected, secret part of the soul, displayed through the alternation of large canvases with tiny gems, small windows to private worlds, infinitesimal glimmers of memories and hopes. This together with the inevitable bees, creates unexpected considerations with strong far roots, that buzz in the mind.

Curated by Ottavio Porto 

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Giuseppe Barilaro, Catanzaro – July 16, 1988, Barilaro’s formal education began at the Art Institute of San Giovanni in Fiore, before he earnt his degree at the Catanzaro School of Fine Art in 2017. He began to present his work originally in 2012, when he was selected by Andrea Romoli Barberini and Wang Lin to exhibit in Xi’an, China and also at the Palazzo Ducale in Cosenza. He then went on to win the National Prize of the Arts in Italy in 2013, regarded as ‘the best student in painting’ by the MUIR.

Over the following years Barilaro exhibited across Italy. In 2015, he participated in the international prize Limen Arte and in the Venice Biennale; in 2017 he exhibited in Rome, Milan and Livorno.

He won the National Arti-MIUR Award with his representation of “Christ Exposed to Confession”.

Currently For Barilaro currently, these years focused on the explosion of the colour red, presented through the mixtures of resins, glues, and colours, and the subject of conceptual metamorphoses in juxtaposition with the combustion process, the essence of matter.

He now works as a professor at the”G.B. Garbin” in Vincenza and exhibits in galleries around the world, from Iran, passing through China, up to New York, where two works were purchased and presented by a museum.

Ever interested in experimentation, fire, and the dynamics of transcendence, Barilaro has started to take part in the world of NFTs that he creates both for sale and as a consideration of copyright. In early 2022, he presented a personal exhibition at the Monumental Complex of San Giovanni entitled “The Oblivion of the Bodies” curated by Lorenzo Canova and he finished the year with a presentation at Art Basel in Miami.

From March 2023 untill May, he is presenting the solo exhibition “Blue Renaissance” curated by Ottavio Porto, at SAC (Milan) and in the summer, with the patronage of the art critic Martina Cavallarin, Barilaro will join the protagonists of a group show in Lecce.

CONTACT
Instagram: giuseppebarilaro_official
Facebook: Giuseppe Barilaro
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