2023|01 – 03 GIULIA NAPOLEONE

„An inner geometry, or better still, an inner chemistry.“

Leonardo Sinisgalli

A GAME WHICH, WHEN PLAYED SUCESSFULLY, IS POETRY

These are the words of FAUSTO MELOTTI, words which the guiding and enlightened hand of GUISEPPE APPELLA combined with exhibitions of the work of GULIA NAPOLEONE, CARLO LORENZETTI, BRUNO CONTE and GIUSEPPE UNCINI, and the game was played successfully, and poetry has indeed filled the rooms of the GALLERIA NAZIONALE.

REALTA IN EQUILIBRIO, the general title for the quartet of exhibitions, is another quote from MELOTTI who, in the leaflet/manifesto handed out at the RODOLFO ARICO and GIUSEPPE UNCINI exhibition at the IL SEGNO GALLERY in 1982, declared these artists „anchorites, aloof from worldly temptations, who, from their windows, watch and learn beforehand and prematurely what it is that will one day serve to construct the edifice of art. Companions in their search, companions in what art demands: sacrifice and love. There is no pretense in this: they are among arts`s cornerstones“.

The maestro`s vision handed the young artists a weighty legacy. Recognition and visibility rendered them comrades in arms and sealed a pact. The cornerstones are also the heavy boulders that sustain the weight of linear architectures, that lift up material, metal, cement, wood, paper and that draw the magic line in a „game which is freedom but freedom is no game“. Something of which GIULIA, BRUNO and GIUSEPPE are all too well aware, never having sacrificed either their freedom or the magic of a single imagined line to which the shape and sound of poetry might be given.

CHRISTIANA COLLU

Director of the Galleria Nazionale d`Arte Moderna e Contemporanea

SIGN AFTER SIGN

Sign after sign, with a patient and necessary precision, GIULIA NAPOLEONE has, for over half a century, been searching for the radiant orderliness of form. A form which possesses vitality and is therefore imperfect, as alive and imperfect as the thinking of someone who is unafraid of errors and therefore shuns the obvious and the familiar. In the silent of her studio – hidden away, for a number of years now, among the hills and lavender fields of the province of Viterbo – the artist is engaged in a stubborn search for an equilibrium in which no concessions are made to the simplicity of figuration, and which, while recognising the rules of abstraction, favours the exceptions that break them, begetting clear, clean images of light and shadow – sedulous images which are the very precise result of techniques and materials always judiciously and respectfully chosen and employed to fit the occasion.

Ignoring all the rigid rules that govern the planning of such things. GN moves amid her discreed and precious works on paper, her canvases, the neatly aligned inks and pencils, with the easy grace of a traveller unpreoccupied with her destination:

“ My work is a journey which perhaps features staging posts, but which has no final destination of end points. It is an advancing towards“.

A journeying towards which is the essence of art at its most authentic, and criticism too.

This is the case for GN and it was the case for GABRIELLA DRUDI, for whom this sense of progression was the mainspring of her writing on art and artists: they share the same curious mien, the same perenially inquisitive disposition. They are – both of these journeys – an eternal search for meaning.

STEFANIA ZULIANI

Auszug aus: GIULIA NAPOLEONE, REALITA IN EQUILIBRIO, LA GALLERIA NAZIONALE