edited by Luigi Fassi
from 9 November 2018 to 3 March 2019
“O Youth and Beauty!” takes its title from the story of the same name by John Cheever , in which the American writer creates a representation of everyday life suspended between beauty and regret, and where the setting between the suburbs and suburban areas outlines the image of post-war American conformism. Similarly, the works of Anna Bjerger (Sweden 1973), Louis Fratino (United States 1994) and Waldemar Zimbelmann (Kazakhstan 1984), united by an intimate use of figurative painting, attempt to outline a portrait of the cultural identity of these authors through a layering of realistic and fictional elements. Fragments of everyday life, through the use of figurative painting, become the tool to give shape to one’s experience in which the tones of melancholy and a cultural identity that appear uncertain and elusive dominate.
The paintings of Anna Bjerger they mutually refer to photographs portraying anonymous characters to trace indefinable figures in undetermined scenarios. The subjects, caught a moment before revealing their identity, are represented between domestic environments and natural landscapes; the artist does not provide further narrative clues and the contraction of the scenes remains unresolved, between perspective cuts, foreground details and distant blurs.
Louis Fratino author of a refined corpus of works inspired by the history of classical and modern art, through the medium of drawing and oil on canvas, he composes a hymn to everyday life. Young men represented in quiet scenes of life, but also lovers wrapped in passion are the protagonists of the depictions, where the meditative register alternates with the melancholic one, moving from solitude to the euphoria of sociality. His works are shown as a tribute to friends, to the desire and regret of fleeting moments of metropolitan life.
Animated subjects such as animals, children, female figures superimposed on natural landscapes and domestic interiors characterize the Sixties and Seventies-inspired illustrations of Waldemar Zimbelmann . The characters depicted reveal the cultural influences that characterize the life of the artist, born in a rural region of Kazakhstan to a family of the German minority and subsequently re-emigrated to Germany during his childhood years. Zimbelmann provides his works with a dual approach:
literary, as they seem inspired by an iconography not far from the dimension of myth and fairy tale; material, through the use and introduction of recycled materials that interact, through a feeling of tactile perception of the material, with the viewer.
The exhibition identifies a hypothesis of story in the comparison between three different figurative pictorial expressions, transfiguring gestures and situations in a soft, restless melancholy.
We thank the bodies that support the MAN’s activity: Sardinia Region, Nuoro Province, Sardinia Foundation.
