Maps for the future

 

The gallery Colossi Arte Contemporanea is pleased to inaugurate a solo exhibition dedicated to the artist

Riccardo Gusmaroli, that will be held in its spaces located in the heart of the city of Brescia. The exhibition will be the perfect opportunity to take a journey through the “Maps for the future” created by the artist, thanks to his extremely evocative works, that reflect his characteristic artistic language based on visual lightness and poetry. Gusmaroli’s artworks, in fact, focus on themes such as the journey and the exploration of new territories, concepts that now more than ever resonate with everyone, which materialize visually through spiral-shaped compositions made with paper boats. These whirlpools of small boats, with a hypnotic pace, form imaginary landscapes on red, white , blue or black monochromes, which transport the observer to a place as remote as possible, moving between reality and imagination. This is what the artist’s characteristic language consists in, which is the result of an artistic research based on the experimentation of different materials and surfaces, represents a visual poetry composed of delicate origami arranged in vortexes, like ocean currents or naval routes, around the silhouettes of geographical borders sometimes undefined, sometimes recognizable. The paper boats become, in this way, metaphors multiplied to the infinity of the all-human and unstoppable desire to explore, to wander, and the will of the artist to go beyond the bidimensionality of the canvas and invade reality. In doing so, his works become vibrant, evoking paths and wave movements sometimes dense and confused, sometimes scattered and neat, surrounding Italy as well as Europe and places whose names we do not even know. As a result, the artist’s research gets conceptual, establishing a relationship with space that turns the parameters of measurement upside down and leads the viewers to immerse themselves in his imaginary maps through a free and above all aesthetic perception. All this thanks to the repetition of models created by a simple act such as folding small pieces of paper, but able to create visual suggestions of extreme delicacy, reminiscent even of oriental arabesques. These tone on tone whirlwinds of boats recreate imaginary journeys in the name of wonder and they are the result of associations, perceptions and bonds that arise from the materials themselves. The artist, in fact, thanks to the rediscovery of paper, a material suitable to exemplify the idea of lightness and fragility on which his language is based, is part of a renewed dialogue with this material, traditionally associated to symbolic references.

The works exhibited in the gallery will be an opportunity to continue to travel through the vortices created by the routes of the paper boats, and get lost in evanescent and at the same time vivid travels, with textures of great formal elegance, given by the multiplication of simple repeated objects, born from just as much simplicity. However, these visual patterns, with their great essentiality, do not renounce to give life to interesting effects that forms on the canvas, created by the contrasts between light and shadow, movement and perception, full and empty, that are able to reconnect the artistic research of Gusmaroli both to the ancient oriental tradition and to the conceptual languages of the western contemporary art.

So, the fascinating monochromes of Gusmaroli are the result of a personal style, with great communicative energy, where dreams and poetry join with the geographical boundaries of the world within the paper sails that flow on the surface of his works and before our eyes, in a rhythmic harmony of movements, marked by  small boats. Boats that bring together on the surface of the canvas distant seas and skies, crossing kilometers,

overcoming the traditional concept of space and proposing a new way of looking at distances. In this way,

Gusmaroli ’s maps for the future are an invitation to cross borders, to think of spaces that seem unreachable

as nearby and to get lost between the folds of paper and the waves of the sea.

Riccardo Gusmaroli was born in Verona in 1963, he now lives and works in Milan. His artistic career starts

as an architectural and still-life photographer, elements that influence his production since the early 90s,

period in which his first solo exhibitions took place.

The 2000s confirm the already fertile exhibition season of the artist, in art galleries in Turin, Milan, Rome,

Bologna, Lugano, Paris at Studio Simonis, Montecarlo, Hamburg, Tel Aviv and Providence, other than in

institutions such as Villa Sartirana a Giussago (Mb), Trevi Flesh Art Museum in Arezzo, the Foro Italico, the Museum of Vittoriano di Roma, the GAM of Turin and the Civic Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

in Arezzo. In 2007 he exhibited at the Liu Hai Su Art Centre of Shanghai on the occasion of the project

Masters of Brera. In 2009 Gusmaroli took part in the collective exhibition Maps at the gallery Meo of Paris,

together with Boetti, Fabro, Pizzi Cannella e Salvo. In 2010 the gallery Colossi Arte Contemporanea

dedicated to the artist a solo exhibition entitled “3 oceans, 7 seas, 149 thousand km2 of land”, while in 2016

he exhibited at the UNIX Gallery and at the 'Italian Cultural Institute of New York, next to Bonalumi, Simeti,

Dadamaino e Pinelli.

The intense exhibition activity of Gusmaroli continued in the recent years, participating from 2016 onwards

in collective exhibitions in Milan, Turin and Padua, exhibiting in museums and institutions such as the

Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art in Arezzo, Palazzo Lascaris in Turin and the fourth edition of the

Biennale of Contemporary Art “Art Latitudes" at Palazzo Ducale in Genoa. Numerous solo shows have been

held since 2016, at different galleries in Milan, Rome, Ancona, Hamburg, Pietrasanta and Lugano.