Onirica

14 April – 2 May
Ravagnan Gallery

curated by A. Redaelli

Opening
Thursday 14 april 2022
18.00

Ravagnan Gallery
Dorsoduro 686
30123 Venezia – Italia

On the occasion of the opening of the 59th Venice Art Biennale, Ravagnan Gallery is pleased to announce Annalù’s solo exhibition.

This selection includes a total of more than twenty-five works realized between 2021 and 2022, some of which have never been seen before and were created for the occasion.

Annalù (Venice, 1976) has always been keen on experimenting with such materials as synthetic resins, glass and cement, symbiotically mixed with bark, roots and fine paper in order to mould unprecedented and highly impactful forms – the surreal stuff her own dreams are made of. The results of this experimentation are her polychromatic Dreamcatchers – mandalas that catch the viewer’s gaze with their eddying movement, and entrap it in their vortex; her Arbors, emotional trees that fuse Bonsai philosophy with sculpture and architecture, vibrating as they do on the wings of fantastic, long-haired butterflies; and her Sagittas, glass books which draw inspiration from the forbidden volumes in the ancient Biblioteca Angelica in Rome – and which display the Artist’s desire to express the metamorphic dimension of the world, and to create a new universe where corporeal and spiritual realities can merge.

“What one perceives as matter captures the gaze very much like pouring rain – a soft sound that is also absolute and inevitable. A breaking of waves in front of the tsunami rising at the centre of her Dreamcatchers, or an intense rustle, like a murmuring of fairies, as we fix our gaze on the restless foliage of her windswept trees. This rustle intensifies the moment we realize that those leaves are wings, and that in an instant everything is going to take flight.” (Alessandra Redaelli)

In Annalù’s latest works, the vitreous materials melted in the furnaces of Murano, or her familiar mixtures of crystals and mother-of-pearl, are combined with a creative and innovative use of 3D printing – an added technological element which transfers all her artisanal work onto a contemporary plane. The butterflies freeing themselves from the prison of tangible circular movement (a distinctive trait of the artist’s), or the Flying feet recalling the dynamic world of Olympia, appear to take shape in a never-ending flux of vital strength. It is precisely within this progress of movement that the artist is able to capture the energy of the gesture bursting out of matter, and to freeze it into an instant – thus moving sculpture closer to the instant-by-instant dimension of photography.

Within a “ceaseless dialogue between thought, ideas, intuition and creation”, as the artist herself puts it, it is this perfect convergence of tactile and material aspects with the poetic mysticism of ancient ancestral symbols that makes Annalù’s sculptures memorable. They are among the most lyrical and evocative works in today’s artistic landscape.