The thirteen works that Giovanni Albanese brings to Rome for the personal exhibition ‘Oro’ which opens tomorrow at the Basile Contemporary Art Gallery, in via di Parione, shine with light. A light which – as the text by Mimmo Paladino that accompanies the exhibition underlines – represents the common thread of Albanese’s work: “Giovanni’s flickering lights, true ‘Lux mystiches’, have the magic of the lights of the saints in churches and children’s amazement for the great light machines of the holidays of the countries of the South”. An idea already supported by Vincenzo Cerami, in the monograph dedicated to the multifaceted Apulian artist, when he recalls that “Albanese calls for help the light, which must be gay, pulsating, tachycardic: blood flowing in the bodies sutured with a blowtorch, bolts and mechanical screws “.
Giovanni Albanese’s research does not intend to propose answers but, rather, to ask questions, after all, as Paladino writes again: “In Albanese’s works nothing is reassuring, here is the tightrope walker who ‘plays’ with the great golden dollar, the sacred calf of our time, just as its dazzling cages are inaccessible, one does not enter and one does not leave. The keys become cages.”
In ‘Oro’ (open until 29 April) the research ideas return – such as the ‘revisitation’ of myths and the recovery of objects for a new life – which characterize the work of Albanese, a multifaceted figure who, over the years, has become known both as an artist (with exhibitions at the Macro in Rome, at the Venice Biennale and at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York) and as a director, where he made his debut in 2003 with ‘AAAAchille’, success ‘repeated’ in 2011 with ‘Senza arte né part’.