SOLO EXHIBITION
SOLO EXHIBITION
SOLO EXHIBITION
The World's Leading Contemporary Fine Art Gallery
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The World's Leading Contemporary Fine Art Gallery
Giovanni
Gambasin
ITALY
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“My research has continued for more than fifty years in an attempt to paint or imagine the contrast between life and dream.”
Giovanni speaks of himself with the gaze that is lost on the line of Asola’s hills, in front of the villa 700 where he has his atelier (Treviso). “I was searching for Surrealism even before I knew it.”
Saving Venice...
"In the Venice Dream," an oil painting on panel that depicts the city, with its most representative symbols, in a new perspective, that, precisely, of the dream, understood not as a simple vision but rather charged with the desire to save Venice by elevating it from the danger of sinking and, at the same time, in a more metaphorical sense, to its rightful place as a work of art, removing it from that collectivity that, for various reasons, has failed to take care of it.
At that moment of his life in when he tried (or deluded himself) to find inside himself a response to the great themes of life: birth, death, judgment of man on man, religion, the rigidity of life, and thought.
Chaos has always been a particularly heartfelt theme within philosophical debate, and art has repeatedly attempted to represent it; Gambasin with his own interpretation also attempts to represent this entity "chaos."
Gambasin's work succeeds in comprehensively representing this mechanism. Various figures appear in it, particularly animal and plant creatures, which seem to be pushing to be detected and recognized.
At the age of twenty, while as a conscript, he was locked in a submarine, he accidentally came across the back cover of a weekly, where the painting “Giraffe in flames” by Salvador Dalì was represented.
“My works always maintain the perfection of the stroke and a fantastic/surreal meditative vein.”
At that sight he said to himself: “This is what I want to propose in my works, these are the pages of the book that I want to paint.” Since then, he has immersed himself in the knowledge of the history of Surrealist movement and other movements around it: Dadà, Metaphysics etc...
“When I was 17, I thought a painting was like a book page. But I didn’t want to write just one page, but several pages in the same picture.”
Giovanni Gambasin has exhibited in numerous cities, including Rome, Venice, Padua, Treviso, Milan, Messina, and Asolo. Internationally, he exhibited his artworks in Germany: Onil Gallery Bremen, Bellingen Art Group, Mindleim Rathaus, Berlin Gallery (Virtual). In London at ErotikArt, in Switzerland, Banja Luka, Pocitelj Bosnia, Korcula and other places.
Gambasin's Surrealism, represents precisely a creation of human thought. In this case there is a lack of opposition to the concrete since the subject itself is by its very nature unknown to rationality.
The shades of blue and green are undoubtedly typical of the sea but also are those that Gambasin uses, predominantly, to represent, in his works, dreaming, thinking as they give the figure a sense of lightness and the possibility of change.
“In a period of my artistic journey, I have also experienced the three-dimensional art of ceramics and the digital photography.”
Gambasin's artistic curiosity has repeatedly encountered numbers: abstract reality, complex and simple structure at the same time, eternal, infinite, yet ephemeral, in search of their character and structure.
Numbers have at the same time the dimension of the infinite and that of the everyday, and Gambasin seeks in his painting to interact with their forms.
This research complements Gambasin's surrealist exploration of life-death reality-dream and the theme of sexuality.
Giovanni participated in more than 320 group exhibitions and painting competitions. In 2021 he received the Art Award of the Municipality of Canale Monterano and Rome University.
But in this case the theme of sexuality emerges overbearingly because the painter has decided to challenge the immortality of numbers by thinking of giving their form a "sexual consistency".
Thus the desecrated (or consecrated) number becomes an erotic support, it becomes in some way "the coat hanger" on which to hang sexual organs and erotic gestures.
It is a surprising customisation born perhaps echoing a little Arcimboldo, in his use of fruit and vegetables to make faces.
In his oil paintings, he showed the visual representation of the dream, the ancient veiling technique, with light and transparent veils, while life is represented with strong and dark shades on rigid geometric structures.
St. Mark's Square its bell tower, Bridge of Sighs.
One a theater of encounters, daily life and celebrations, the second a gateway to suffering. Almost opposite realities that coexist, intertwine and merge, just as the bodies, naked and sensual, depicted in attitudes of enjoyment and pain, seem to do.
The mask above the Bridge of Sighs suggests to us the desire to evade the rules of reality, to be able to be anyone one wishes in a fantasy world, perhaps a dream that inhabits the unconscious.
The series of drawings presented here mark the return of Gambasin, after a long period of inactivity, to the artistic production of pencil and colored chines miniatures.
Gambasin wanted to represent in a fantastic and creative sense by letting the hand and the roughness of the paper support guide the realizations of fantastic and monstrous figures that the artist imagines in his imagination.
“Through the representation of the dream, I started to be surrealist, when I did not know the existence of the movement.”
Fantastic and surreal silhouettes are developed in the twisted and chaotic sphere, feeding the furrow of the earth below and tending to the fertilization of the earth.
Despite the technical differences from the past, in them, remains the presence of the dimension of the dream, understood as thinking, and reality in a relationship of opposition and, at the same time, of dialogue.
The search and discovery of marine fossils tell the story of the land where the artist lives and dreams of the past, an immersion in the past with fantastic and unreal figures, the result of the roughness of cotton paper, which guides the pencil to the creation of the images.
In their entirety, these works, accomplice also their small size, they can all look very similar, but on a closer inspection you can note the particularities that makes each work as unique.
"Mixed Technique" includes: The background made with frottage technique, then elaborated with tempera colors, colored pastels and pencil for finishing and details...