Primo Piano LivinGallery is pleased to invite you
to the solo exhibition TESTE COLME (FULL HEADS) by Gianni Chiriatti
Curated by Dores Sacquegna
Under auspices of Martano’s Municipality
May 4 to 14, 2024 (Opening day May 4 at 7pm)
Santi Medici Cultural Center in Martano (Lecce-Italy)
The exhibition and the works
Imagining and create new worlds is definitely the art that distinguishes Gianni Chiriatti aka “Borgagne,” an artist born in Switzerland and returned to his homeland to bring to life unprecedented pieces of reality-or unreality-composed of zoomorphic figures and tripods of fruit that represent the marketplace of life with its beauty, carnality and tragic nature. Divided into multidisciplinary cycles between painting, photography, installations and video, the artist’s works, play on the trilogy between human-animal-vegetal nature and accompany the viewer into a Wonderkammer animated by zoomorphic characters and narrative counterpoints. The starting pictorial cycle of the personal exhibition TESTE COLME/FULL HEADS is inspired by an emblematic place of the Salento landscape: “La specchia dei Mori o del diavolo” where works such as Martano, Cumulo a riposo, La livella, and Specchio delle origini find their place. Representations in which the artist emphasizes the fig tree (present on the heap of stones of the specchia), among breasts, eyes and other visionary elements, also present in the series dedicated to the “Metamorphoses” of which Cosmogonia, Asino in Riflessione , Era è sarà metamorfosi e Santi Cosma e Damiano dedicated to the two saints of the eighteenth-century chapel that hosts the exhibition.
The production continues with photographic-installation grafts of “planted heads” where we find clear references to issues related to ecology, sustainability and peasant life with the installation of female and male portraits including: Benevolent Head, Papal Head and more. Works, which look at the redesign of the living space of human beings in relation to the natural environment, a conceptuality also expressed in the installation Poltrona (armchair), composed of a bed filled with wild healing herbs, as a reference to biodiversity and the cyclical nature of life. Closing the exhibition, the 2024 video entitled Propaggine(Propagation), in which the artist, sets up a visionary en plein air synergistic garden, where his “planted canvases” come to life among cultivated and uncultivated land, as silent witnesses to the nature from which they originate. Constant elements in the video are the ladder (a symbol of branching to the sky), the toilet/seat (a symbol of the earth, roots and the here and now) and the white mask that in stark contrast to the artist’s black dress, plays on the duality between darkness and light, life and death, human nature and artifice.
The artist – Gianni Chiriatti is an artist from Puglia, born in St. Gallo in Switzerland, in 1973. He spent his childhood between his hometown and Borgagne, where he has lived and worked for many years. A self-taught and multifaceted artist, he expresses himself in multidisciplinary practices such as painting, photography, video art and installations. He has participated in group, solo and biennial exhibitions in Italy including Pescara, Rome, Lecce, Otranto and abroad including Spain, Egypt, Monte Carlo. In 2012 he received the Critic’s Award, during the Salento Biennial set up at the Carlo V Castle in Lecce. In 2023 he took part in the art residency project Baroque Blue: the sacred stones of Salento, as a Salento artist in dialogue with international artists in Santa Caterina di Nardò (Lecce), organized by Primo Piano LivinGallery and curated by Dores Sacquegna.
Daily with free admission: 18:00-22:00 (Morning by appointment)
Tel: +39 3289469538 |+39 349 37 20659
officinameridionalekaliani@gmail.com / dores.sacquegna@gmail.com
