With a text by Davide Ferri
GALLERIA D’ARTE MODERNA
COMPLESSO MONUMENTALE DI SANT’ANNA
Via Sant’Anna, 21 – 90133 PALERMO
05 > 07.2011
I met with Stefania Galegati Shines’ works recently, just a few months ago. One day, in Palermo, Francesco Pantaleone told me about the past exhibitions held in his gallery by using a series of invitation postcards as a story thread, each with an image of a work by an artist. These are typically those things that you go back home with, fling into a drawer and forget about. But instead, that evening, at the hotel, I took them back up and looked at them with attention. I arranged them beside one another and played like making my own personal classification. And that was when Stefania’s shots (a very simple image, a child plunging off a cliff with a slight torsion of the body and hand, and his mouth wide open half-way between a smile and a scream) made me forget completely about my list (I think that image would have been listed first) and I remembered of an interview that I had read some time earlier: “I was interested in being able to capture an instant. Like holding your breath for a moment” – the artist had said.
That image would be first in the list. And later I also found it on the invitation card for Stefania Galegati’s exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery of Palermo, where it was ideally selected as the opening work and hung near the entrance of the first room.
However, like many others, I started to become acquainted with Stefania Galegati’s work since the mid Nineties. At that time, she lives in Milan and attended Alberto Garutti’s classes in Brera. Stefania was among those who followed his chair from Bologna to Milan, in 1994. If you don’t know it, Alberto Garutti is an Italian artist who, over the last – say – fifteen years, trained those two/three generations of Italian artists.
Garutti’s classes ended up by becoming the only real academy in Italy. An apprenticeship path towards the present official art, so to say…
Stefania was also a member of the via Fiuggi group, which is one of the last attempts at living in a commune in a city that, over the last few years, has pushed artists towards individualism more than exchange. There’s a bunch of rather funny anecdotes regarding that experience that are still worthwhile listening, so when I meet Stefania I always ask her to tell me how days were spent in that large studio house, where artists that shared something lived together, but mostly grew through daily dialogue. Stefania Galegati, Diego Perrone, Simone Berti, Giuseppe Gabellone and others characterized an age in Milan and throughout Italy over those years, one that is rather difficult to define, though. Luca Cerizza tried to do so, in a recent book where he used Italo Calvino’s idea of lightness as a guiding thread to trace a history of art in those years. And then there is Duchamp, of course, mixed with suggestions that come from something more Italian, such as magic realism and metaphysics. And something rediscovered, like Alberto Savinio – Savinio the writer, but re-read with the sensitivity of someone who is reading Douglas Coupland’s novels straight through.
Some of Galegati’s most popular works (the sword forged by a meteorite fragment; the little terracotta but dangerously radioactive samurai; the images with the furniture of a country home with the outline of a dwarf cut out of it) were conceived within that atmosphere.
What else could I say of Stefania’s biography? In 2004 she was awarded with the New York prize, where she lived for a while. In 2005 she held an exhibition at the Macro, where she had an ancient statue of an Amazon taken from the Capitoline Museums and erected in a special room built for her – a controversial work, indeed. However, we have heard no more of her in the last few years.
This is a problem that concerns many among the best artists in their mid-career in Italy. We know everything about them until they reach the age of 30-35 years, then only a few institutions and critics accept the responsibility of following their evolution to maturity (precisely when an artist’s work becomes more interesting than at the beginning).
In addition to that, Stefania Galegati Shines has travelled a lot over the last few years, and this might be the reason why we have no more news from her. She went not only to the United States, but also Latin America and Africa. Her wanderings seem to talk about a very strong drive towards the south of the world, which entered her works in the form of a warmth and a new rhythm (as in some of her recent videos, notes carelessly taken during her journeys, where the progression of the images seems to have been established by music).
And then she spent a short period in Rome, after which she eventually took the decision to move to Palermo. A friend of mine once told me that one goes to Palermo to hide somewhere. In fact, sometimes Stefania played with hiding, behind the looks of Scintilla Robina, a very fashionable and somehow clumsy editor.
Finally, I would like to add that Stefania Galegati was born in Romagna, in a village of the low lands around Ravenna. A thick fog comes down from the sky during the winter in those places and the landscape around is a totally flat and monotonous countryside. This perhaps explains Stefania’s attraction for rather undefined things, like ghosts, small domestic apparitions. I think that her origins affected her look, to a rather good extent. And it’s good to read thanks to the municipality of Bagnacavallo in the closing credits of some of her videos. In Passeggiata in paradiso [A walk in Paradise], the two old people meet precisely in that village, and in the vicinity of that village she must have also shot the scenes of the strange duel between two huge agricultural machines in Dove si racconta profondi sospiri e lunghi pensieri [Where Deep Sighs and Long Thoughts are Told]. Her father’s small picture gallery, in her parents’ house in Bagnacavallo, features the works of many local artists, and also some of Stefania’s works, but sort of camouflaged among the others. I often thought that I like some of her paintings and drawings – with stiff posing figures, an insisting frontality, dry and sharp strokes – because of their rather rough and naïf character. It is the same pleasure that I feel in front of certain Henri Rousseau paintings, or those of other great amateurs.
Many were puzzled when she took up painting. Some say that she is not a painter. Or that, when she paints, she sinks into an excessive anecdotage. I would rather say that certain landscapes in Stefania Galegati’s work are impossible to understand.
Even the Palermo exhibition highlights a sort of inconsistency. There is a background noise that is confusing. I prefer this painter when she uses her insight and simpler gestures, as when she tries to transform the correspondence between an artist and a collector into a book that unexpectedly becomes a love dialogue. In 1001, instead, she just laid a portrait of Garibaldi – borrowed from the Modern Art Gallery collection – on the trailer of an Apecar, as if the dimension of the “outside”, that of the streets of Palermo and of life, broke into an institutional space. The same applies for the action she proposed during the official opening: two souped-up cars with large hi-fi systems emitting high-pitched sound in the museum’s courtyard. Some people looked around in astonishment, others started dancing. These are small, precise actions used to wrong foot the beholder and reveal the inconsistencies of reality. Then, behind lightness, the apparent joke and even the fragility of some of her works there is often a threat of a violence that is about to explode.
The pictures in the first room look like a carousel and are noisy as the caravan of a circus entering a village. Inside, one can see the things that Stefania did over the last few years. She was obsessed by bunkers for a long time, as the ultimate space around which people gather like wild animals. The cages and corrals of empty animals and the scientists that step down a coach in the middle of nowhere recall an end-of-the-world landscape. The series of outlaws whose names are tied to forms of popular narration, just like the images of the monuments with the posing groups, speak of an extreme survival of the ideas of monumentality and heroism. You mentioned Douglas Coupland, earlier – and an excessively marked narration style. Perhaps I am just proposing old clichés again. And yet, if you focus on all this, you will realize that, in spite of an apparent naïveté, her paintings are nothing but landscape and figure, the most classical combination ever.
Listening to what we are saying, one would think that we are talking of two different artists…
Two, and probably even more. One of my problems with Stefania Galegati’s work has been, for years, her evasive identity. Later on, a few months ago, as I said, that image of the boy plunging off the cliff was like a revelation to me and I understood that I had to resign myself. Stefania is instinctive and multifaceted. If, for example, she decides to look for the colour purple for months – the purple of clothes, of luminous signs, of things noticed by chance – she does so, and that’s all. I think that much of her recent work has to do with this idea of “capturing the instant”. It is the other side of the most affected Garutti style, that characterised the environment where Stefania was trained. The south that entered her recent works is a form of disarticulation, of extemporaneousness, something almost grotesque that stands side by side with the precision of the beginnings, of always.
The result is the impression that a four-hand novel would be written, let’s say by Agota Kristof and William Faulkner.
On the other hand, many of her works, as you also said, are based on opposites, on dissonance. The works on display at the Modern Art Gallery insist on certain elements from work to work, recombined in a different manner every time. The theme of heroism is dissolved in Passeggiata in paradiso in a love scene between an old woman and a former Partisan. The faces in Pirates are also heroic and vaguely sensual: this is a new series of paintings portraying the faces of Somali pirates taken from a few photographs found on the Internet, painted on striped fabrics that are usually employed to make curtains for exteriors. In Palermo that fabric is also used to cover balconies with the aim of preventing passers-by downstairs from looking at women’s legs…