Golden ratio, Exhibition White Manifesto, Milan

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Golden ratio:

Ancestral place. Architectural form. Empty space.

From 23 May to 22 June 2024

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White Manifesto

Via Benedetto Marcello, 46, Milan

Closed today: open Wednesday at 16:00

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PAOLO DE STEFANI GOLDEN RATIO - Ancestral place. Architectural form. Empty space. ON DISPLAY from May 24th to June 22nd, 2024, Tuesday to Saturday 4pm - 7pm OPENING RECEPTION Thursday, May 23rd at 6:30pm Free admission The exhibition - curated by Elisabetta Sem - presents a recent core of works that investigate and explore the concept and interpretation of the golden ratio, the mathematical language of beauty, starting from the landscape suggestion, formal and chromatic, of Val Codera in Val Chiavenna - province of Sondrio - a place personally experienced by the artist, to conclude in the space of the Milanese gallery. The works - papers, canvases, and a metal sculpture - are divided into 6 nuclei within a progressive elaboration of the golden proportions, from the line to the regular plastic polygon, refined and subtle stylization of the crystal: Vision, Golden Signal, Place, Fragments, Place-Space, Golden. The places of origin and choice of Paolo De Stefani represent the inseparable premise of his artistic inspiration, not so much as assimilation and faithful rendering of recognizable landscape images, but as a deep breath of a subtle and intellectual essence of the mountainous forms, as an interpretation of the natural elements that captures the most authentic and refined essence of chromatic ranges. The author seeks in drawing the roots of observation and his own art: "This expressiveness is partly linked to the morphology of the rock: deep fissures are evident in some of my works, especially in the paint-sculptures and in the latest ones with geometric figures of essential, purified, stable and unstable forms at the same time. I do not copy what I see, I internalize it." The work starts from a rooting in the material and closes in a spatial dimension of infinity, comparable to the sensation of emptiness perceived at high altitude: a distillation of a physical sensation and at the same time an abstract and universal dimension. Paolo De Stefani was born in 1969 in Chiavenna where he currently lives and works. In the early nineties, he attended private painting courses where he developed and perfected the drawing technique. The essentially figurative stylistic signature that characterized the works of the early years gives way to an abstract research. The beginning of the new millennium coincides with a significant turning point in his research through works structured by evident overlaps of papers in wooden cases and sculptures made of cardboard material soaked in enamels. In 2007-2008, the sign-calligraphic aspect materializes and the cycle of paint-sculptures on board begins, mainly ink and tempera on cut paper fixed with nails. The iron sculptures and thick collages date back to the biennium 2015-2016. He has been collaborating for years with the gallery "Franca Pezzoli contemporary art" in Clusone. Among the personal and collective exhibitions, we remember Transcendences-Sic Transit Plurs curated by Salvatore La Vecchia, organized in 2016 by the Museum of Piuro and set up on the site of the ancient landslide of 1618, and in 2022 Inner Landscape, indefinite time, absolute space at "Casa Matteo" in Fino del Monte curated by Elisabetta Sem. The time of stones by Marcello Abbiati Within a harsh and bare (meteoric) landscape, a powerful staircase rises, twisted along rocky flanks, seemingly inaccessible. Behind those who climb, a greenish-blue transcoloration - absolutely dazzling on sunny days - reveals the lake basin of Mezzola and, further west, of Lario, with the pyramid of Mount Legnone looming over the water mirrors like an alpine sphinx. Once a certain altitude is reached, a shady small valley of elms, birches, and chestnuts, watched over by rustic votive chapels, leads to the suspended threshold of Codera. The village, all made of granite terraces, staircases, and airy balconies, seems to belong more to the south than to the Alps. As tenaciously exorcised, the call of the abyss looms over this naked and impressive cleft that is Val Codera, in an environment that becomes desperately anchoritic and bewildering as one follows the white and dusty strip of the path that penetrates into the heart of the valley towards the meadows of Bresciàdega. The brooms whitened by dust, the black and gray rocks that dot the pastures, the treacherous diagonals of the poured granites, the hissing of the viper nestled in the stony ground. All this I find in the works of Paolo De Stefani: an environmental and existential dimension never described, but always perceived, understood, and assimilated. With stubborn rigor, Paolo tells the desperate geometry that comes from the inevitability of hydrogeological facts, where the anthropic space is still forced - to exist, and fortunately for us - to struggle to loosen the weave of the laws of nature. In Paolo's works, I also find that same pure light of Val Codera, which veils everything in tones of dust; which leads me to hope that his works can find, without excessive approximation, an adequate placement in the metropolitan white cube of Manifiesto Blanco. As it happens, I am reminded of the Legend of the True Cross by Piero in Arezzo, whose golden and peremptory perspective boxes filled with pure colors - containing "nothing else" but cylinders, cones, diagonals, parallelepipeds - open unheard-of perspectives in the otherwise pallid walls of the Franciscan temple. In an attempt to bring a bit of Codera, to use the words of Pietro Bellasi, "in other long and narrow valleys, in squares and metropolitan clearings, where the appointment with the time of stones had been lost, perhaps forever." And succeeding, subtly, in still hearing the incessant and threatening roar of the stream.

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	opens - closes	last entry
monday	Closed now
tuesday	Closed now
wednesday	16:00 - 19:00
thursday	16:00 - 19:00
friday	16:00 - 19:00
saturday	16:00 - 19:00
sunday	Closed now

Golden ratio:

Ancestral place. Architectural form. Empty space.

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