From 25th September to 11th November, the group exhibition “La ballata della vita” (The ballad of life) will be on view at Marina Bastianello Gallery, in Mestre. The exhibition, curated by Francesco Liggieri, presents a dialogue on the innermost meaning of life and death amid artists Giacomo Bolzani, Beatrice Gelmetti and Paula Sunday. By drawing attention to society’s difficulty in correctly expressing the meaning and weight of life and death – even though it is always present in media communication as an undercurrent to which we usually do not assign the value it deserves – the artists invite the observer to reflect on the aforementioned subject starting with the body.
Beatrice Gelmetti, Summer power nap / 36 degrees, 2022. Acrylic, chalk, oil on canvas, 145×200 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marina Bastianello Gallery
The body is the absolute protagonist of the exhibition, which is structured in a circular path reflecting the stages of life itself. The tale is manifested starting with Beatrice Gelmetti’s large canvas entitled “summer power nap / 36 degrees” that represents the first stage of life: the carefree image of childhood, the freedom to be, to live with one’s own body freely, far from the social conventions that oppress adulthood. Dream and reality mix and overlap in continuous stratifications of materials, shapes and colours, taking the viewer back to the age of childhood, in which anything is not perfectly delineated and where there are no established boundaries.
Paula Sunday, Room 428 / Diario di una doppia, uso singola, 2022. Digital photo, variable size. Courtesy the artist and Marina Bastianello Gallery
Paula Sunday leads us into the stage of adult life, representing maturity, both physical and intellectual, in the quadriptych consisting of works coming from the projects Babylon, S.O.B. (Solitude of Bodies) and lastly Diario di una doppia, ad uso singolo (Diary of a double, for single use), in whose works the figure of the female body is central. Putting herself at stake in first person, the artist uses her figure as a means of communication, seducing us and revealing the urgency of reassigning a certain degree of meaning to the depicted body and consequently to all of our bodies. The exhibition path concludes with a triptych of environmental videos and with “Caravaggio era un maiale” (Caravaggio was a pig), a documentary by Giacomo Bolzani. We are in the last stage of the life cycle and the artist invites us to look back and retrace the events that have marked us. The documentary shows, indeed, Pasquale’s life: a former advertising man who decided to quit his job to run a pig farm, in which he also conducts experimental performance art research.
Giacomo Bolzani, Caravaggio era un maiale, 2019 (with Pasquale Martini). Full HD 23” col. Courtesy the artist and Marina Bastianello Gallery
The exhibition as a whole invites the viewer to follow a path, a tale, a journey of growth and reflection that leads to grasp the change determined by the transition from childhood to puberty and from maturity to old age. Strong is the awareness that this journey must be faced with our body, thus we are all invited to dance until the orchestra will play.
Info:
Giacomo Bolzani, Beatrice Gelmetti, Paula Sunday, The ballad of life
curated by Francesco Liggieri
25/09/2023 – 11/11/2023
Marina Bastianello Gallery
Via Pascoli 9c, 30171 Mestre Venice
marinabastianellogallery.com
Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, she subsequently attended the School for Curatorial Studies in Venice. She writes about contemporary art with a particular eye towards emerging artists and experimental research projects.
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