Painting Stories

Luca Coser, Pietro Finelli and Daniele Galliano have the presumption to renew a meditation on painting and art that, although contemporary, comes from afar, and which claims a particular way of investigating the real, not at all obsolete.

The title of the exhibition mentions New York Stories, a 1989 collective film consisting of three episodes, directed by the American directors Martin Scorsese (Lessons from life), Francis Ford Coppola (Life without Zoe) and Woody Allen (Oedipus wreck), dedicated to New York.

The pictorial research that developed in the 80s and then partly continued in the early 90s was born, as stated by the American critic Jerry Saltz, “many times and in many places of the 70s”. The 80s in art did not feel the need to “break” with the previous decade but to make the achievements fruitful. The happy childhood of the many small and large artistic movements of the 80s while highlighting the hypocrisy of the previous “committed message” is therefore not the result of trauma. Not only that, but the sudden lack of certain truths, of absolute references, has opened to innumerable proposals often in opposition to each other, giving rise to unusual cohabitations and generating what has matured as a utopia: the possibility of specific actions that potentially included all the other.

The young artists trained (didactically) in those years, once “mature”, faithful to this “multidisciplinary” imperative and free from ideological bonds, have never stopped “searching”. This is why many of them can be said, quoting Saltz, that “they were born many times and in many places” and for this reason it can be said that their art far from political / cultural dogmas is measured with itself, in an introverted way and personal, more in a path to be taken than in a value to be affirmed.

These considerations are the basis of Painting Stories: to present the painting of three “figurative painters” who have always worked in these terms and who, in the urgency of embracing the “general”, have marked the formal and conceptual results of their research, with the recovery of personal and collective memory (never in a nostalgic sense), and of quotation (never in an academic sense), as a need to re-affirm and re-build.

The figurative representation that derives from it tends to escape from itself, to the denial of its narrative prerogatives, tends to confuse the cards, and conceals mystery; the artists are aware that every “free” image refers to other images, every “free” narration to other narrations.

Overall, about 30 recent works by the three artists will be on display, including canvases and papers and each artist will have a room in the exhibition space of Villa Vallero, open from 16/11/2019 to 15/12/2019 on Saturday and Sunday from 15-19.