Andrea Valleri. Palingenesi

The exhibition Palingenesis by the Venetian artist Andrea Valleri will be running from June 19 to July 10 2021 at the headquarters of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation on the Giudecca island, in the charming Cloister of SS. Cosma e Damiano. Represented exclusively by the Contini Art Gallery of Venice and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Valleri asserts himself in the contemporary art scene thanks to his continuous and assiduous search for a fruitful and constant dialogue between the art of the past and the current language. This exhibition was born exactly from this desire to investigate the present that is reborn, after a long and painful period of social and cultural stalemate, renewed and influenced by new experiences and a new human consciousness. The exhibition consists of a collection of pictorial and sculptural works in which the artist's poetics is precisely expressed through the evocative and symbolic force of ancient myths, the ideas and scenarios of the classical world, the anguish and contradictions of the post-modern man. Through a language that unites Pop Art and hermeneutics, Valleri plunges into the investigation and discovery of the classics to bring it back to light and demonstrate how the fundamental values of communication and human relationship with history and experience are concretely present in contemporary times and are fundamental to identify our conception and perception of the world. While technology, current lifestyles and postmodernism aim to undermine the idea of a profound link with the past and tradition, Valleri's art proposes a fluid dialogue between what was before and now. In the pictorial works, the compositional style develops starting from the figurative which is then reformed by the use of heavy and intense acrylic colors which, spread on the canvas with original gestures, deconstruct the image into lights and shadows, highlighting its volumes and contours. The artist chooses his subjects drawing them from his own experience: fluid Venetian landscapes, magnificent churches, ancient buildings and views of ruined monuments, which evoke our indelible bond with history and the past. An example is the splendid view of the Island of San Giorgio, Palingenesis - San Giorgio (2021), the hues ranging from red to intense orange, spread on the canvas, immersing the black silhouette of the church in a fiery, almost primordial dawn. Architecture, a metaphor for the construction of the self, seems to rise renewed from the placid waters. Palingenesis - Flavian Amphitheatre (2021) is also a metaphor for life: the Colosseum stands out, illuminated from the inside, against an intense blue sky, and shows itself in its entirety as a symbol of contrasts and challenges that belong both to general and daily life. In sculpture, it is the very material of the work that constitutes a harmonic synthesis in which the elements interpenetrate, creating archaic forms that evoke the archetypes of our collective unconscious. The very choice of the material components of the sculpture, such as wood and stone, is a further indication of the artist's propensity to evoke the ancient and the origins which, as roots, are the foundations of contemporary man. An emblematic example is the sculpture The Pythia (2019), the priestess of Apollo who would give answers in the sanctuary of Delphi, represented with a wooden and rigid body and a slightly hinted face characterized by incisions that identify the lines of the eyes and the nose, without a mouth, almost as a metaphor for a hidden future. In front of this work, the observer feels magnetically captivated and involved as the artist's will is precisely that: to encourage the viewer to investigate himself. The investigation of oneself leads to rebirth, a concept made tangible in the work Phoenix (2021), the mythical bird metaphor of resurrection represented by the artist as a slender and elongated figure with a hooked beak that gives it a deliberately destabilizing aspect, deeply legendary. Getting to know Valleri's art can be an interesting spiritual adventure, an opening to a universal and interminable dialogue that guides us through the labyrinths of thought in order to stimulate the consciousness to enrich one's inner dimension.

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