Omar Galliani's seductive drawings on display in Treviso

The exhibition Souls - Anime, a solo show by Omar Galliani (Montecchio Emilia, 1954), one of the most appreciated and acclaimed contemporary Italian artists and among the greatest living draftsmen, has kicked off in Treviso at the Casa Robegan Civic Museum. Curated by Daniel Buso and designed by Giorgio Russi, the exhibition runs from December 2, 2017 to January 28, 2018, and displays twenty works by the Emilian painter, some of them monumental in size, covering a period of activity from the 1990s to the present.

“Galliani in his twenties,” art historian Flavio Caroli recalls in the catalog, “was mainly lost in two ambitions. In a search for magic, for seduction, for fascination that is the primary obsession of every great artist, in any time, whether he is tragic (Caravaggio), classical (Ingres) or fundamentally realist (Degas). Everything changes and everything runs, but there is no great artist when there is no search for Beauty; for some form of Beauty. Galliani’s second obsession was in fact the executive quality, precisely technical in the very ancient sense of the term, of painting and its mysteries: something not easy at a time when stuttering and bad painting seemed the key to modernity. Galliani achieved extraordinary results thanks to the realization miracles of a pencil that was perhaps truly among the most gifted of the post-World War II period. In the thirty-plus years since those days, the miracle has only deepened.”

“Omar Galliani’s research,” adds art critic Teodolinda Coltellaro, "sinks into the figural densities of the past, into the historical extensions of art, of which he evokes cultural models and linguistic motifs that he combines in an original expressive syntax. His sensibility, fully contemporary, knows how to grasp the aspects of transience and complexity of our time, the mobile scenarios that connote its systemic dimension, but translates them in ways and forms that solicit the gaze to deeper interpretive paths that are not exhausted in the here and now, proposing the recourse to memory and citation as a process of creative rebirth in the alchemy of form. [...] For Galliani, the work is, as a matter of priority, drawing: from the physical dimension of tracing (of muscular exercise protracted to the point of exhaustion), of covering a surface with signs to its being an articulated, fluctuating, living phenomenon, animated by its own memorial biology that determines its existence and in which worlds of darkness and light admirably interpenetrate and dialogue."

The exhibition can be visited during the opening hours of the Robegan House Civic Museum: Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., Saturdays, Sundays and holidays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Closed Mondays. Admission: full 6 euros, reduced 4 euros (for students under 26, over 65, Bailo Museum ticket holders, Musei Civici loyalty card, FAI, ARCI and Touring Club members). Free for under 18, disabled with accompanying person, journalists with order card. For information: 0422 544895, or visit the website of Artika Eventi, the organizing company(www.artikaeventi.com). For information on Omar Galliani you can visit the artist’s website: www.omargalliani.com. The catalog is published by Quaderni d’Arte di Casa Robegan and includes texts by Flavio Caroli and Teodolinda Coltellaro.

Pictured: Omar Galliani, Felden Lake (2016; oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm)

Omar Galliani's seductive drawings on display in Treviso

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