LE PLEIADI
From 23 May to 20 June 2024
Candy Snake Gallery
Candy Snake Gallery presents The Pleiades, group exhibition that combines small-scale works created by twelve artists, some of whom are exhibiting at Candy Snake Gallery for the first time. The title of the exhibition refers to the celestial vault as a place of imagination.
In the painting of Riccardo Albiero (born in 1996 in Chioggia, where he lives and works) the magical vision of nature is expressed through the dreamlike reworking of symbolic elements taken from the medieval tradition. Greyhounds, thistles, snakes and allegorical portraits are the main elements of this symbolic universe projected towards a metaphysical vision of reality.
To create his works Pablo Bermudez (born in 1988 in Pereira, Colombia, lives and works in Milan) uses volumes of magazines from different sources to transform them into sculptural objects with complex filaments of meticulously carved paper. The archive of images contained in the magazines is then reworked to focus attention on iconographic details or to eliminate any recognizability of the initial image in a swarm of clippings reminiscent of the plant world.
Martina Cioffi (born in 1991 in Como, where she lives and works) expresses herself through a plastic, sculptural and installation language. In particular, since 2020, she has focused on the ceramic medium with which she creates site-specific works. Her research draws inspiration from the amazed observation of the transformative and resilient capacity of plant organisms. She develops in a symbolic rereading of the landscape and our indissoluble bond with it. Her imagery seeks to evoke an ancestral bond with a powerful, creative and fruitful nature not yet stripped of her magical inspiration, seeking a disturbing aesthetic.
In the paintings and drawings of Riccardo Gil Ferraro (born in 1990 in Pavia, where he lives and works) the archetypes of the God, the Goddess and the Animal are recurrent, interpreted with simplified forms that emphasize their iconic and symbolic appearance. His painting is characterized by pastel colors and shades inherited from chiaroscuro on paper. His passion for history and the mythical narratives and legends of different places often enters his works.
In his works Matteo Gatti (born in 1989 in Olgiate Olona, lives and works in Turin) hybridizes natural and cultural elements, using materials of a heterogeneous nature. In Matteo Gatti's drawings, fragments of reality are united in a narrative through images that provide an alternative, playful and enigmatic vision of everyday life and the contemporary visual flow.
In the works ofWang Jundi(born in 1993 in Liaoning, China, lives and works in Milan) a dense and aggressive painting emerges, where the subjects are framed in close-up details that bring out a strong pictorial gesture. The narrative approach combines with expressionist restlessness that recalls gore cinematographic imagery.
Margherita Mezzetti (born in 1990 in Siena, lives and works between Berlin and Venice) investigates the construction of identity through paintings characterized by a figuration that is both bold and gentle, constructed through photographic language and digital manipulation . The subjects portrayed are acquaintances of the artist, friends with whom she creates a dialogue that leads to the construction of a fantastic narrative from which images of unreal and constructed beauty arise, which acquire a renewed intensity through the warmth of the pictorial medium.
The work of Luca Rubegni (born in Rome in 1993, lives and works in Paris) focuses on the representation of everyday objects deposited or abandoned in unreal and dreamlike spaces, staged as if they were part of a theatrical scenography . His compositions give life to scenes out of time, suspended in eternal immobility. Hints of figures and elements in flat colors are lost in the realm of immortal things, where the history of painting becomes a point of dialogue and iconographic appropriation.
The works of Maïté Seimetz (born in 1995 in Luxembourg, lives and works between Luxembourg and Paris), often grotesque and disturbing, reflect on the interconnection between human beings, objects and environments and seek to deconstruct boundaries between animate and inanimate. Her works transcribe the real into the digital and vice versa, creating surreal mutations that hybridize these two worlds in an engaging and theatrical way. Her practice focuses on digital methodologies such as 3D printing, digital sculpture, animation and AR/VR technology.
The works of Simone Stuto (born in 1991 in Caltanissetta, lives and works in Turin) are characterized by a strong iconographic tradition of medieval and Renaissance origins, without ever losing the characteristics of contemporary aesthetics. They lead back to intimate atmospheres linked to the sphere of the dream, where the space is saturated with abstract compositional pictorial elements, which restore the atmosphere and which are often inherent to the figures.
The work of Lorenzo Tonda (born in 1992 in Florence, where he lives and works) moves through three main artistic mediums: painting, sculpture and muralism. These three traditional aspects of figuration are united by a preparatory study in three-dimensional graphics. The main themes arise from love and the study of classical-Renaissance compositional canons combined with suggestions of a more heterogeneous nature filtered by a heroic-tragic (at times grotesque) vision of reality.
Starting from the dialectic between digital culture and interiority, the works of Francesca Vanoli (born in 2000 in Treviglio, lives and works between Milan and Venice) tell of emancipated but melancholy characters: subjects capable of denouncing the critical issues of present. The spectator is reflected in this - almost - fantastic imagery, already present within our visual culture.
