S I N C R O N I E

S I N C R O N I ES I N C R O N I E

S I N C R O N I ES I N C R O N I ES I N C R O N I ES I N C R O N I ES I N C R O N I ES I N C R O N I E

D A R I O M A G L I O N I C O

C L A U D I A C O N T U

c u r a t e d b y

S I N C R O N I E

S I N C R O N I ES I N C R O N I E

S I N C R O N I ES I N C R O N I ES I N C R O N I ES I N C R O N I ES I N C R O N I ES I N C R O N I E

SINCRONIEDario Maglionico

Art Gallery of the Visconti Castle of Legnano3th - 18th september 2016

Exhibition curated byClaudia Contu

In collaboration with

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© 2016 Claudia Contu for texts© 2016 Dario Maglionico

Printed in Italy in July 2016 by Arti Grafiche Civerchia Srl.

Stanze dell’Arte al Castello Visconteo di Legnano

www.privateviewgallery.comPRIVATEVIEW

Thanks toThe organizers would like to extend a heartfelt thanks alderman Umberto Silvestri, Mariangela Tirnetta and the entire culture office of the town of Legnano.We also thank Silvia Borella, Mauro Piredda and collectors for their loans that have made possible the realization of the exhibition.

I met Dario in March. Reserved, slightly embarrassed, he opened

before me his portfolios and catalogues. I immediately realized that

I was watching something unique, unrepeatable. The stroke, color,

perspective construction of his works surprised me and has involved

me in a continuous game of questions. Where I am now? In or out?

Far or near? in the present or in the past? it’s true or false? People and

objects are dynamically fixed, they stop the moment, but at the same

time they project themselves towards the next one, and you will be hit

pleasantly by the vitality.

Chatting, I come to find out that he had spent much of his young

life in Legnano. Meanwhile, in those spring months, I was planning

the exhibition “The rooms of the art”, to valorize the Art Gallery of

the Visconti Castle of Legnano through solo and group exhibitions of

artists of national reputation with a strong link with the city. I asked

Dario to participate and I really appreciated his willingness. The younger

generation is knocking on doors of art but I think for Dario them are

already open from time.

Umberto Silvestri

Councillor for Culture of the City of Legnano

It has been said many times that paint is a medium in crisis and that art has

started searching for alternative ways to express itself. From the invention

of the photography to Land Art’s final intents, which refused easel painting

and the gallery system, as underlined by a famous quote by Walter De Maria:

«My new brush is the Caterpillar». However, there have been some artists that

returned obstinately to this medium everytime, as Salvador Dalì did, whose

objections to the duchampian conceptualism and the avantgarde development

stayed famous. And the manifesto of his protest is a 1955 work, titled “The

Lacemaker (After Vermeer)”, that hides all the artist’s hope in painting and in

its optical instances as witnesses of the impossibility to leave it as a form of art.

As a consequence, painting has changed its rules and its fields of study,

restyling itself but also preserving its main features. During the present years,

it looks like this issue is leading back again to the people and their relation to

new technologies and the dynamics of globalization. Hence, we could say that

the opposite of a copernican revolution is going on and, because of progress,

a “paradigm shift”1 has been imposed by a new scientific and technical vision

which increases the value of the idea all men have on their world.

1 Kuhn T. “La struttura delle rivoluzioni scientifiche” Einaudi, Torino (2009).

Sincronie

Claudia Contu

Maglionico’s poetics fixes the human being and its environment into a dreamlike

suspension atmosphere. Wide vanishing points, various points of view, and

plans intersections make the viewer’s perception vary, suggesting everytime

a different way to approach the canvas. Figures also incite this attitude, as

their sudden disappearing is functional to the recognizing of something else

behind them. Even if their poses might be bizarre, they reflect the will to pose

questions to the beholder: Where are you? What are you looking at? Who are

you? Could you look at yourself by a different point of view?

Our memories are fixed to our brain by the synchronic union of at least two

senses: a scent, a particular situation, a voice tune, are the single elements,

but is their overwriting which set the complete memory. Maglionico’s images

are like a transposition of these memories, synchronies of a life which is the

meeting point of every single past or present moment inside of it. But are there

limits to this process? Thanks to some university lectures and to his interest

in the relation between perceptives dynamics and the physic reality of things,

the artist has criticized and contested human perception, which is often seen as

a key player for us to understand the world, but during the last years has also

been judged as misleading and nonfunctional by the scientific community’s

discoveries.

“Reifications” is the series through which the artist is looking at these issues.

A reification is the mental process that combines the past experiences to certain

memories, in relation to those we hold as present instances. As a consequence,

it allows to manage all of them on a temporal line that is subjective and based

on one’s own experience, so we can assert that a precise reference system is

missing, and our way to stock memories is extremely related and limited. The

paintings holding this name try to prove this process, underlining its lacks and

contradictions, they are the synchronic vision that joins cause and effect, past

and present at once. And, in order to do this, every person is figured while it

lives its own story, that is resumed in the impact on his or her living space.

Everything Maglionico has painted really does exist, but often changes because

of the human behaviour and its influence on the world it lives, that is constantly

in become. As Heraclitus realized over 2500 years ago, Panta Rei. Everything

Study of the dark, Before falling, 2014 oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm

Reification #2, 2014oil on canvas, 125 x 80 cm

flows and passes, and the recent quantum theories have proved we can say

the same about untangible factors we would not think about before, such as

time and space. As science tells, they are nothing but mental constructions

that nature and evolution gave us to let us adapt to the world around them.

Reference points to face life, without thinking that time has no dimension - or,

if you like, it flows in all of them - and so does space, which has more directions

that the only height, width and depth.

So, does it makes sense to adopt just a point of view on reality? Does

perspective, with all its historical meanings, have sense? Or is it just another

typical human reference, that does not exist in nature? Maglionico uses the

perspective system highlighting its leaks and contradicting its rules by using

holes and adding different plans one on the other, so that even the nearly

objects and the people around get involved.

The only certainty is the importance related to humanity, and this is why its

works search for a direct approach with who is watching them. The big canvas

give the impression to be able to step inside them, while the small ones search

for a vis-à-vis contact. To make this intention more tangible, all paintings

contain elements such as carpets, mugs, lamps or dressers that are easily

recognizable, and through which the beholder’s memories can fix, and then

turn on a bouncing between the particular and the universal that shall lead

to recognition and identification. Also, by stepping in the canvas, it becomes

suddenly clear that there are some kind of exit ways, such as doors, windows

and hallways, that remember us what we are looking at is only one room, and

that outside it there are several more ones, potentially unlimited. Just like

limitless are the possible points of view on reality one could achieve if only he

could leave the sensitive reference system that is thought to be the one and

unerring.

Colour is also a subjective and misleading instrument to understand and

interface the outside. In the first Reifications the charachters’ energy was

underlined by using high tones and contrasts, while the more recent paintings,

such as Reification#11 or Reification#12, have a chromatic palette that supports

the psychological dynamics of the representation and its messages. This is

Reification #4, 2014oil on canvas, 125 x 80 cm

Study of the dark, To throw, 2015oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm

Study of the dark, Stairs, 2015 oil on canvas, 84 x 56 cm

even much evident in the last works, from Reification#15, thanks to the parallel

research on lighting conducted by the artist in the “Studies of the Dark”.

In the Studies, which are all small-sized works, colour is covered just before

it becomes unrecognisable, canvas desaturate as the introspection factor

becomes more relevant. Just as when we are in a room and suddently the lights

go out, we are disoriented at first. We realize the painting slowly as we realize

the dark, catching the little light that comes from a locked window or from an

electronic device. However, as we see it, there is one thing we undestand for

certainty, that is something or someone is there, or that light would not exist.

In the darkness we see the world with different eyes, the objects’ edges are

confused and it is easy to fall in a status of hanging, with the impossibility to

go on in a space we do not know. Or this is what it seems to be like, in first

instance. Because, after a while, we start recognizing familiar forms, and new

perspectives are formed from the old shadows. We understand there is no

difference between the new situation and the old, as the factor that has actually

changed, and that has the power to change all the rest, is ourselves.

This is why Maglionico’s work in not prescibed from the very beginning, but

modifies itself basing on the image’s needs. Starting from photographies of real

situations, with people living their houses both posing or not, the artist transfers

on the canvas those elements that caught his attention during the shooting. By

using a gestual and spontaneous painting he creates a background on which

those hints are going to be set. After that, the rest is made by a controlled

balance between adding and removing. Oil painting, as darkness, needs time,

but can reveal a whole world if one has the patience to listen.

This approach is very intimate, and even more noticeable if we think that

paintings as Reification#10 or Reification#14 were born from autobiographic

issues. The artist represented his parents in the first case and his grandparents

in the second. Both of the couples are symbols of the genealogical line

everybody has and, in addition, of the concept of life as a handover from father

to son that implies the passing of a portion of eternity. If the time we live in

has no dimension, if it does not exist a before Christ or an after Christ, then we

are submerged in a continuous flow of eternal present that we start to feel in

Study of the dark, Black dish, 2015 oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm

Reification #11, 2015oil on canvas, 116 x 190 cm

Study of the dark, Lapo, 2015 oil on canvas, 55 x 40 cm

the moment of our born and that ends when we die. All the rest does not exist,

because we do not sense it. The parent has this task: to pass his son a fragment

of the eternal. On the canvas hidden by the colors of Reification#10 lays this

sentence: «We host life in a potential of immortality».

There is a sort of choral aim in this conception of human life and of the

eternity it holds, that contrasts the idea of loneliness of that condition known

as “liquid life”2, which is the result of Post-modernism and of the technology

development set during the last twenty years. Liquid life and society cannot

preserve a resolute form or create solid basis on which building something,

as the world runs faster than ever to tastes, attitudes, or information that,

instead, become obsolete in a little. To face the huge amount of data that follow

this situation, we have objects in our hands that can answer our questions

everytime we ask them to. Smartphones open new horizons to us. Therefore,

in addition to a physical but also perceivable space, in works as Reification#20

Maglionico starts to represent a virtual and immaterial space, that seems more

tangible than the material one. This paradox can be understand if we think

about the ability we achieved through the internet of meeting people miles away

far from us, or partecipating events that are setting at the other side of the

world. In the mentioned work, the smartphone lightning in the middle of the

canvas makes that space present. And we can say the same about the sparkling

of the led lights in Reification#19, Reification#12, or Study of the Dark. 22:22.

As we mentioned before, space is always present and travels in every direction,

both material and immaterial. And it is curious to notice how this virtual place in

which web servers identify and memorize every online research – the so-called

Cookies –, creating sort of maps based on the users’ preferences, looks exactly

like a technologic version of a reification.

With his work, Maglionico gets closer to a complex and ambiguous, but

also interesting, field of study. The repeated bouncing between science and

psychology, particular and universal, intimacy and community, perceivable

feeling and factual reality of things, is the key to understand his work as well,

and it is also a starting point which has already set the traces for a research

that has lots of potential.

2 Bauman Z. “Vita liquida” Laterza, Roma-Bari (2008)

Reification #12, 2015oil on canvas, 80 x 120 cm

Study of the dark, Darkroom, 2016 oil on canvas, 75 x 60 cm

Reification #9, 2015oil on canvas, 120 x 170 cm

Reification #14, 2015oil on canvas, 90 x 130 cm

Reification #15, 2015oil on canvas, 115 x 180 cm

Reification #17, 2015oil on canvas, 145 x 95 cm

Reification #18, 2016oil on canvas, 125 x 200 cm

Study of the dark, 22:22, 2015oil on canvas, 61 x 43 cm

Reification #19, 2016oil on canvas, 145 x 130 cm

Reification #20, 2016oil on canvas, 135 x 135 cm

Study of the dark, Lamps, 2016 oil on canvas, 75 x 60 cm

Born in Naples in 1986. Lives and works in Milan.

Education

2013 Master in Biomedical Engineering, Politecnico, Milan.

Solo Exhibitions

2016 Sincronie, Pinacoteca del Castello Visconteo, Legnano (MI), curated by Claudia Contu.2015 CLAUSTROPHILIA, RivaArtecontemporanea Gallery, Lecce, curated by Ivan Quaroni.2014 REIFICAZIONE#, Biblioteca storica della Societa’ d’incoraggiamento d’Arti e Mestieri, Milano, curated by Filippo Ciavarella.

Selected Group exhibitions

2016 Premio Marchionni, MAGMMA Museum, Villacidro (VS).57° Premio Internazionale Bugatti Segantini, VIZIO DI FORMA, Villa Vertua, Nova Milanese (MB),curated by OUT44.Dentro | Studi Festival #2, Luca Miscioscia Studio, Milan.2015 ArtVerona | Art Project fair 2015, Area\B, Verona.OTHERNESS Identita’ IN-definizione, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, curated by OUT44.Painting as a mindfield, Area\B, Milan, curated by lvan Quaroni.9° Premio lnternazionale Arte Laguna, Nappe Arsenale, Venice.2014 Dolly / Multiplo contemporaneo, Circoloquadro, Milan, curated by Marta Cereda.2013 Premio d’arte Aldo Alberti, Centro Giovanile Stoa e Biblioteca civica, Busto Arsizio (VA), curated by Gaia Prandoni.

Awards

2016 Premio Marchionni, Museo MAGMMA, Villacidro (VS), mentioned.57° Premio Internazionale Bugatti Segantini, Nova Milanese (MB), finalist.2015 9° Premio lnternazionale Arte Laguna, Nappe Arsenale, Venice, finalist.Como Contemporary Contest, Como, finalist.Celeste Prize 2015, Milan, suggested.Premio Combat 15, Livorno , suggested.2014 Premio Arte Mondadori, Milan, semifinalist.Premio Combat 14, Livorno, suggested.2013 Premio d’arte Aldo Alberti, Busto Arsizio (VA), finalist.

Pubblications

2016 SINCRONIE, catalogue curated by PRIVATEVIEW Gallery, text by Claudia Contu.2015 Claustrophilia, catalogue curated by RivaArtecontemporanea, text by Ivan Quaroni.La pittura come campo mentale, in Painting as a Mindfield, catalogue curated by Area\B, text by Ivan Quaroni.OTHERNESS, catalogue curated by OUT44, text by OUT44.Arte Laguna Prize 14.15, catalogue curated by MoCA, ODE edizioni, Nappe Arsenale, Venice.COCOCO 15, catalogue curated by Francesca Testoni, Salin editore, Como.Combat Prize 15, catalogue curated by Paolo Batoni, sillabe edizioni, Livorno.

Press

2016 Il Giornale dell’Arte n.363, Rapporto Annuale, April.2015 La Repubblica, October.La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno,October.Il Quotidiano di Puglia, October.Artribune n.27, September.Corriere della Sera, April.La Repubblica, April.Milano Finanza, April.

Web

2016 Claudia Contu, Studio visit, contemporaryimage.com, July.Lorenzo Madaro, Lecce, quadri di vita intima di Maglionico, repubblica.it, January.2015 Cecilia Pavone, La lenta scom-parsa dell’uomo. In mostra a Lecce, artribune.com, November.Ivan Quaroni, Dario Maglionico. Claustrophilia, ivanquaroni.com, September.Simone Ziffer, REIFICATION - DARIO MAGLIONICO, thear tocracy.com, July.Zach Tutor, Dario Maglionico’s Gho-sts, supersonicart.com, January.2014 Nastia Voynovskaya, Dario Maglionico’s Paintings Convey a Haunting Presence, hifructose.com, November.Nelson Kamdon, Dario Maglionico Creates Mysteious Ghostly Paintin-gs, momentsjournal.com, November.Kumiko Joanna lshida, Mini Inter-view with DARIO MAGLIONICO, m-u-s-e-u-m.org, November.Doll Ida, Reificazione | Dario Maglio-nico, cocteldemente.com, November.Jacob Grossman, Dario Maglionico, UNDR RPBLC MGZN #30, undrrpblc.com, September.Jeff Hamada, Dario Maglionioco, booooooom.com, March.

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