Milena Laudani Webdesigner © Giuliano Cardella 2024
A constantly evolving artist
Giuliano's style, informal and centred on the sign, is recognisable in all his works, from paintings on paper or canvas to ceramics and large installations realised in various contexts throughout Italy. In fact, Giuliano does not want to represent or describe, but uses sign and colour as a vehicle for emotional transmission, involving the viewer in his profound experience. The work is therefore not generated from a sketch or following a logical scheme, but is realised through a sequence of creative gestures, often superimposed: in this way, different drafts are superimposed without cancelling each other out, but rather highlighting each other in a harmonious whole.
Presentation by Francesco Rovella
Having worked as a gallery owner for many years, I have been willing and able to visit many artists' studios because, beyond the vision and judgement that can come from viewing works, I am convinced that only in the studio can one truly discover the world of an artist. To visit that private universe is to cross a path where everything speaks. The canvases, the papers, the paintings, the drawings, the paint tubes, the brushes that often look like flowers with long stems inside a vase, the pencils, the pastels, the charcoals, everything tells of craft and dedication, discipline and or anarchy. By now I have such a habit of deciphering the messages that come from objects, including chairs, tables, lamps, the light coming in through windows that I could, without even seeing the works, understand the artist's vocation. To make a long story short, if, for example, you walk into an abstractionist's studio, you will notice an order that even amazes our imagination. A maniacal cleanliness. The colour tubes are all lined up like toy soldiers, even in rows by colour gradations, all blues, then reds, purples and so on. Even the brushes have their own arrangement, by size. It is precisely abstraction, that process of subtraction, which many times leads to geometric forms, that allows no digressions or licences. The order of things acts as a counterbalance, or rather as a mirror, to the compositional order that, deprived of figuration, needs balanced and well-defined forms and colour. On the contrary, if you visit the studio of an informal artist, you will find an explosion of colours, a creative disorder of materials, bits and pieces and strange objects stained with paint, ashtrays full and long since unemptied, the floor distorted by indecipherable footprints in different tones, sometimes superimposed. In that universe it is fury that commands, there is no order, indeed there is the negation of the same. The studio transpires the modus, it unmistakably resembles the paintings.
So, upon entering Giuliano Cardella's home studio, my wonderment came from a unique environmental situation that one rarely encounters. An elegant house, a penthouse in the modern centre of the city of Catania, with many of Giuliano's beautiful works on the walls, and on the shelves, his wonderful multifaceted sculptures. One breathes the serene air of good living, and both Giuliano and his companion Francesco are people of an exquisite timeless kindness, of that aristocratic simplicity now rare. A large terrace, with a beautiful view of the city and the volcano, soberly furnished, floods with light an almost empty living room, where a few large canvases stand out, a disruptive impact with Giuliano's bewitching painting. Then one enters his work rooms to enjoy all his works on cardboard, stacked in columns, hundreds of sheets, and then the works already glued live on thick wooden frames, or even inside ancient frames heavily ruined by time that create an intense short circuit between past and present.
Overlapping lines, shapes and colours
It is precisely this experience that gave rise to the title of the exhibition ‘In my rooms’ organised in my Carta Bianca gallery, imagined not only as an exploration of the studio rooms, but also as an entry into the places of the artist's mind; an incursion into his incredible world of superimpositions, colours, signs, scratches and words of an unknown alphabet. And yet, in describing the studio, I forgot to mention Giuliano Cardella's works, which is the most important thing and the subject I had to write about. At first glance, his works may remind one of Street art in its fast graffiti with its polymorphous writings and use of spray cans, but then one realises that the works come from another dimension and, despite the joy they convey with an overlapping of colours and signs that are repeated in several works as elements of his identity, they remain ‘unreachable and mysterious’... I like to look at one of my finished works and have the feeling that I myself am unable to grasp it completely, to grasp all its possible meanings, just like a viewer looking at it for the first time. Mine are works in constant transformation' (from the presentation for “Summer Exhibition 2007” at the Royal Academy of Art in London.
Bottom line....
These words by Giuliano Cardella himself immediately help us to get in tune with the artist's feeling and his ability to surprise and amaze, to convey intense and ever new emotions, to subvert
rules and pre-established schemes, leaving light and indelible traces in our souls.
Milena Laudani Webdesigner © Giuliano Cardella 2024