Giuseppe Gallo

DANCE OF IDEAS
October 1 - October 31, 1998
Artist's reception: Wednesday, October 14, 6-8 p.m.

Giuseppe Gallo makes a debut solo exhibition with Associated American Artists representing his first exhibition in New York since 1992. Gallo presents a series of new works on paper titled Dance of Ideas. The artist links the physical and the cerebral with a personal testimony that "when you dance, you draw."1 In the case of the twenty new works in this exhibit, the ideas revolve around elegant references to various flora. The majority of the works measure approximately 18 1/2 x 14 1/2". There are three diptychs and one triptych in which single pieces are placed side by side, like delicate cards, whose images bear mysterious patterns, specific specimens of plant life sometimes in poetic combinations with other motifs. The ephemeral is suggested with Gallo's offering of leaves, flowers and other elements that float in shifting spaces much in the way that thoughts and dreams can collide and hide, appear and disappear in the mind.

Born in 1954 in Rogliano (southern Italy), Gallo lives and works in Rome. From these two geographical sources, Gallo filters and sifts through the depths of time and space associated with ancient culture. In the diptych, Backbone is Always Blue, the red crisscrossing patterns of the right panel create a kind of fishnet device. The diagonal lines running up and down, edge to edge, are stretched tight. Two large oily oozing areas, a technique Gallo uses with great skill, seem to have the ability to spread through the mesh where small, abstract brushy forms seem more likely to be caught. The counterpart to this piece offers a beautiful and delicately rendered blue column of vertebrae, suspended horizontally in a position that suggests a rhythmic movement. Beneath this image is a blood red ginko type leaf shot through with a perfect hole. The oil stains spread like veils in the background and the red pigment drips from the top edges of the page as if the piece itself where cut from some living thing.

The artist's signature use of a rich, red oil pigment, associated with the walls of Pompeii, is applied in varying degrees and form with each piece in the exhibition. In La Felce delle Grazie, a red fern rises in a curvacious riddle up into space. Three figurative forms, like ghosts, seem to have traversed literally from the "other side". Numerous other works share this kind of illusion created from painted elements on the reverse of the paper.

Acacia of the Philosopher, which appears on the exhibition invitation, references a tree which is found in abundance throughout the Italian landscape. Three elegant, thin branches of the tree, with perfect oval shaped red leaves, are laid together as if an offering to some higher force.

A catalogue, with a statement from the artist, accompanies the exhibition.

Gallery contact: Carol McCranie

 1 "The Play of the Infinite" by Emily Braun,Giuseppe Gallo oh vocazione. Gian Enzo Sperone, Gian Ferrari Arte Contemporanea 1990-91

Gallery contact: Carol McCranie

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