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New icons and small circuses in Lello Gelao’s latest exhibition La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, 18 April, 2013 Lello Gelao gets back with his works after four years in the gallery Muratcentoventidue Artecontemporanea . Almost interrupting with his oil painting the long "cold" sequence of artists invited by the gallerist Angela Gonnella , female artists mostly, mainly of North European area and working with the privileged media of video and photography. But the long sideline did not hurt the artist : it allowed him to further refine the new direction of his painting shown in a solo exhibition in 2009. When he exhibited - as I wrote then - a series of solitary male figures, absorbed in looks telling about mature melancholy or waiting , defined with sharp simplification in the context of à plat painting, without volume, therefore basically abstractive: for which he is indebted to the pre-post pop, from Alex Katz to Elisabeth Peyton . That iconic choice recurs now, with interesting developments to which the influence of the North-Central European culture should not be alien: even with direct relationships (dating back to three years ago his solo exhibition in Dusseldorf). The growth can be seen in the increased "Gothic" dryness assumed by the figures, thanks to minimal graphic interventions made with the same color, carving shadows of folds in the shirts, cutting out profiles, accentuating anatomical details. So the looks are always elusive, but they have taken self-awareness, almost an otherness ostentation able to control the flight of the chromatic spaces on which they are engraved. The larger size and the tension of the compositions developing in length and the intensity assumed by the relations among colors , no more characterized by "still pallor" as four years ago, contribute to the achieve the result . Exemplary the great altarpiece with a portrait dominated by a monumental blue coat. The '' invisible present "of the new icons is a counterpoint to the grace of some little theaters suspended in thin grids with circus elements made of poor materials, wires clothes cards and glasses, with white small statues of bears and trained lions. It recurs here the size of dreamed childhood games, affecting his early painting. But the “theaters “( "Le Cirque du Soleil") exhibited in 2007 at the Acif by Mimmo D'Oria, were more schematic - if I correctly remember - these ones are now made with miniature realism.
If youth knew, the melancholy of solitary men of Lello Gelao Actually that register of amazement has merely changed tonality and subjects. Indeed, it can be culturally defined: as perceived in the canvas that acts like a window beyond which a boy is rushing by just like in De Chirico’s mysterious siesta – a metaphysical echo that comes out in some paintings’ titles. The Beckettian sense of waiting, evoked by Lia De Venere in a catalogue, blends in with a sense of time passing, and of vanishing dreams ( “If youth only knew…”). In this figural change-of-course the intriguing aspect lies in the adoption of the “flat painting”, which, by subtracting space and contracting time scales, has always marked – in art – the moving away from realism in favour of a culture showing an inclination to abstract. It is precisely Clement Greenberg who refers to flatness in order to exalt the new “non-objective” American paintings of the 50’s. But at the same time the ones who tended to focus on icons from the world of advertising and cartoons were artists who would laid the way for pop art i.e. everyone from Stuart Davis to Alex Katz. In any case, no overseas references would be needed for an artist with a Mediterranean repertoire of faces with goggled eyes, ranging from ancient Egyptian portraits of the Fayum to Byzantine iconology, or, in our modern times, to the primitive figures of various European “returns to order” of the twenties and thirties. Whether it’s planned or not, a complex sense of the refined gradually comes out in Gelao’s simplified repetitions: in the minimal variations of glances and barely imperceptible torsion, in the diagonal lines dictating temporal cuts into the spaces (a wall, a balustrade, a set of stairs), and in the chromatic construction that shapes a visual culture taken from cartoons – coloured shadows, ellipses and concise graphic signs – resulting in a minimal oil painting with a vintage flavour to it, with softness of colour relationships, in a light of static paleness. Once again, it’s a case of time fading away. La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, 9 October, 2008
Tomorrow, the day after Tomorrow, or perhaps never. Mr Godot told me to tell you that he won`t be coming tonight, but he`s sure to come tomorrow. Portraits of youngsters drawn to show a three-quarter profile, a whole-body or head-and-shoulders portrait, sitting on steps on a sea-side bench, posing in front of a window, enjoying a good smoke or about to perform a dance routine: these are the protagonists of Lello Gelao`s latest works. In this exhibition it is not merely the research into variations on a theme belonging to that loftier realm of art - the portrait - a form so admirably interpreted in the history of western art, which has principally motivated the artist – a complete painter able to make such diverse digressions into other expressive methods, in this series of paintings. Gelao, indeed, has made a carefully-weighed decision which has taken him into the depths of the art of painting. New works of art represent a sound, intrinsic need to give new substance to an on-going debate, to give new body to a long-standing tradition involving the search for pictorial talent, a commitment undertaken at a young age and then practised diligently from then on, combining careful thematic consideration and a fresh style with a lively airiness and clarity of meaning, while showing an knowledgeable admiration for the great masters of the Novecento – not only this, but always seeking to inject new elements into the work. A confirmation of the audacity of his only apparently anachronistic choice – regrettably painting does tend at times to show its face in the contemporary art scene of photos, videos, installations and the like, being widely used but often lacking quality - can be seen in his use of oils on canvas, an age-old technique that still communicates something essential, despite those who feel it should be made obsolete. It is the long time required to exercise the oil-painting technique that seems to fit in with the Leit-motiv that pervades the gallery of portraits prepared by the artist. How can one not think – when reading titles such as Il gioco del tempo, L’attesa dell’estate, Tutto passa, Aspettando - of a sense of suspended time that every human knows, in which present time is of lesser interest, the thing that counts being what has yet to come, i.e. the future? Gelao`s men are clearly expecting not someone but something – an event that will interrupt Young men standing alone, with peers to either side of them, individuals on the threshold of adulthood, restless in the face of that ``shadow line`` accompanying every important existential choice. At this point it comes naturally to think of the protagonist of that famous novel by Conrad that looks into such issues, and of the testing challenges marking the passage from youth to adulthood. But as in the fortress Il deserto dei Tartari of by Dino Buzzati, in which Giovanni Drogo spends most of his existence, in most cases the sense of waiting – in itself frustrating – becomes pointless. Thus time flows inexorably away, dreams fade, and if we look back at how we have spent our time, the total amount of hours, days, months and years spent waiting, we may come to realize – albeit too late – that what we were waiting for will never come about. |