DIES ILLA
Gianriccardo Piccoli and Alessandro Verdi
Curated by Giuliano Zanchi and Giuseppe Frangi
Casa Testori
27 November 2021 – 26 February 2022
Two artists with a long history, deeply marked by the recent pain of their homeland. Gianriccardo Piccoli and Alessandro Verdi are united by their common roots in Bergamo and by the seriousness of an artistic path that has led them to a production of great intensity and originality.
The exhibition at Casa Testori proposes two paths that intertwine in the various spaces, in a dialogue that sees Piccoli occupy the walls with some series of large drawings made from the time of the pandemic to the present day, and Verdi occupy the centre of the rooms with tables that display his large artist’s books. The dialogue therefore takes place between the intense black and dense shadows of Piccoli’s papers and the pages on which Verdi’s powerful “spot” shapes are imprinted.
The guiding thread of the exhibition is precisely this confrontation under the sign of a common dramatic perception of reality; a perception that has courageously determined their respective recent choices.
Piccoli has worked in cycles of drawings, often inspired by the images of other artists, as in La stanza di Louise Bourgeois or Il Letto di Van Gogh. He has a neo-romantic vein, marked by a great existential tension that translates into a search for light within sheets marked by the body of darkness. Verdi, on the other hand, with his large books, so dense in form and image, almost like contemporary illuminated manuscripts, accompanies us in a post atomic age meditation.
The exhibition is also intended as a tribute to the two artists at a significant moment in their biographies: Piccoli will be 80 years old on 15 December 2021, while Verdi has just crossed the threshold of 60.
Posted on: 22 December 2021, by : Alessandro Ulleri