In 1996 Stefania Galegati, not Shines yet, is in London. She is just 20 in a city that now as then has always something to tell. This trip into a far memory brings us into the house of a bizarre, eccentric and brilliant man, an architect and collector: his name was John Soane. Interesting man, eclectic, his house-Museum is one of the most interesting places for the collecting history, with its paradigmatic origin coming from the sense and the sensitivity of a passionate intellectual following his instinct and pleasure.
Stefania Galegati Shines seems attracted by this man, for sure she is attracted from the space, from his messy direction, from the non organized nature creating an intense collection of objects, works, statues, portraits and drawings, among whom of italian artists, speaking a known language. There are so many thing Soane wants to show and so strong is his anxiety to share what he loves that he decides to build tricks of light and plastics to make his museum more magnificent; he projects big walls “to flip”, as a book. Moving walls to duplicate space and amazement.
This juvenile experience has been hidden for years as others, in the shadow of the mind, silent. Along with it, Stefania Galegati from time to time learn how to collect others, looking after them, sometimes stopping by. Memories are there, they are, sometime they disturb her sometime they reassure her. A collection of memories, feelings, moments that quickly leave a trace. An archive the artist knows to have , solid, as a certainty.
Tuttifrutti is an exhibition that recaps the maturity of contents, the consequence of an inner bomb, the explosion of different memories coming to light from a past never gone by, fluctuating and suddenly part of a determined work, ready to be told. It is a dynamic research, with no hierarchies, intentionally disarming. Galegati Shines reconsiders the space, she uses the London mode of the moving walls, creating a not only visual but also conceptual turn over, conceived to constantly focus and set the gaze. Functional to her idea of collection. She does not use selective criteria to describe her research but she uses open and horizontal ones, in a simple and clean way. She puts things together, she proposes her own vision: disenchant and irony and a lucid, bittersweet and honest point of view of the contemporary society, dealing with a distracted and superficial routine where it is always needed to “place ourselves”.
You are not my sweet skater collects a series of shots starting from 2006, a long array of writings on shirts and various garments, with the common feature to be part of an indefinite awareness, sometimes conscious, sometimes not. We do not know how intentional might be to bear words, we do not know the perception in being forerunner of the message within. Yet there is a remark on language. As for some words written with no sense, as the useless posts on social networks looking for approvals or the claims of mass media destined to nothing. Empty and useless words as soap balls, not bearing the magic though but only the inconsistency. The artist questions on all the wasted words, on the abuse of words we have lost the strength of, raped and mangles, debased and contracted.
Galegati Shines seeks the importance of language, its strong sense that establishes culture, the happiness of its affirmation. The tongue set free that for Elias Canetti meant “awareness” , opposition to the lose of it, opposition against ignorance and the traps that sometimes demolish the identity of people.
This work expresses the beauty of mastering a language, to share it, to learn it, to teach it in its entirety, with all the secrets, knowledge considered freedom and true independence.
The photo series Bar sport, retrieves three shots of an empty and bare bar; anonymous and secondary space, abandoned.
Images edited with the artists’ sharpened gaze, introducing figure of sleeping men. She depicts sleeping ghosts lost in the indifference torpor. What are they doing there? They might be sentinels using sleep as antidote, deleting the equation “anonymous=ugly”; they become customer of the findings, trying to spot beauty where there is not. As it might happen even in a bare and empty bar.
Gli illuminati is a series of four pictures, oil on cardboard, of sleeping men.
Stefania Galegati Shines uses the painting technique, the most traditional one, to reproduce the notes taken from her iconographic repertoire, made of stories and people. She introduces warm and clear color, intense, an irregular shape as memories are and a tridimensional element that makes the differemce: a bright crystal jabbed in the middle of the head, a gash that in the crystal purity materialize a need, preserving from torpor, celebratig the intellect, the Aristotelian and active one, never definable, but perfect instrument to understand the world.
In the middle of the exhibition path Galegati Shines places Inside Outside Upside Down (Landscape for my brother), installation with a hidden and precious small work. An essential round table, under it there is a soft clear carpet, inducing to rest. To see it properly you must stop and bend. You must look and find, go beyond intentionally. What you can not see is a whole world, a microcosm waiting to be discovered. There is a depicted landscape, circular, foggy as the one from Romagna, the one of Galegati’s childhood, a bit Leopardi like. A landscape never existed maybe, that is only inside those bearing an intimate and reassuring vision, belonging to an indefinite time, evoking past memories where to feel home.
Within this exhibition there are two outsiders, the disarming element, independent works but perfect in a fluid context like this: Tremate tremate le streghe son tornate and Infinito.
The first is a serial print depicting a woman with a vaguely alluring smile, elusive. On her back Galegati Shines underlines with a marker, endlessly repeating it, the sentence title of the work; a short text that grasps and boost that uncertain smile, moking those who observe it. It seems to warn on falsity of some behaviours, of excessively benevolent behaviours, not scrimping anyone yet that do not admit you within its “salotto buono”. A typical procedure of a small culture, not used to breathe the air of the world, that has the same breeze for everyone, air that makes cooler and tones up.
Infinito is a double oval painting of two unknowns reminding to the mysterious interest of Galegati Shine for graveyards. The artist used the old memory of a visit to the Verano Cemetery in Rome. She works accurately on an image taken years before. The work depicts husband and wife, next to each other in life and death, bearer of an never ending link and a bit antiquated. In a moment where nothing seems to last, as human relations, the artist shouts her against the grain culture, reminding the value of relations, making them the focus of interest. Galegati examines the fragility and the importance to determine feelings. With her irriverent acuity she affirms the sense of her thinking, with an open and not simplified language.
The exhibition is closed by Tuttifrutti: the video is a complete immersion within another element and as for all the immersion, instruments are needed for the transit. One of them, as for all the exhibition, is once again disenchantment. Without it, it is not possible to enter the phenomenology of feelings turning over in Galegati Shines’ research.
Tuttifrutti is the portrait of a reality very close to reality tv programs moving forward a disorientation hardly able to to recognize limits, excess, chances and needs.
It is a story of images, with a perfect soundtrack, picking scenes of people’s marriages, highlighting strong social contraditions between to be and showing off.
The characters in the video are looking for a place that it is clearly not their natural one, everything is surreal: atmosphere, behaviours, movements, objects, food. Everything looks defaced by the unawareness… these young couples start their life together, passing by an air chamber that will make their return to real life impossible. Banquets worthy of Trimalchio, crazy dances, behaviours reproducing models and out of reach etiquette.
Tuttifrutti in its paradox celebrates the naive and happy casualness of our own real chances, celebrates the disenchantment with, even for a few hours, everything is possible and real. The desire of being nicer, richer, more elegant, happier passes by the tale par excellence, the marriage, the step to the adult life, that summarizes dreams and hopes in future.
Respecting these hopes, real and pure, Galegati Shines, with her clean eye, frees the story from any judgement, exalting the absurdity, making it ironic and moving.
On one side the hope for a better life, through the party, on the other the awareness that nothing changes and that everything will be “reality”, even if just for one day.
Agata Polizzi
In 1996 Stefania Galegati, not Shines yet, is in London. She is just 20 in a city that now as then has always something to tell. This trip into a far memory brings us into the house of a bizarre, eccentric and brilliant man, an architect and collector: his name was John Soane. Interesting man, eclectic, his house-Museum is one of the most interesting places for the collecting history, with its paradigmatic origin coming from the sense and the sensitivity of a passionate intellectual following his instinct and pleasure.
Stefania Galegati Shines seems attracted by this man, for sure she is attracted from the space, from his messy direction, from the non organized nature creating an intense collection of objects, works, statues, portraits and drawings, among whom of italian artists, speaking a known language. There are so many thing Soane wants to show and so strong is his anxiety to share what he loves that he decides to build tricks of light and plastics to make his museum more magnificent; he projects big walls “to flip”, as a book. Moving walls to duplicate space and amazement.
This juvenile experience has been hidden for years as others, in the shadow of the mind, silent. Along with it, Stefania Galegati from time to time learn how to collect others, looking after them, sometimes stopping by. Memories are there, they are, sometime they disturb her sometime they reassure her. A collection of memories, feelings, moments that quickly leave a trace. An archive the artist knows to have , solid, as a certainty.
Tuttifrutti is an exhibition that recaps the maturity of contents, the consequence of an inner bomb, the explosion of different memories coming to light from a past never gone by, fluctuating and suddenly part of a determined work, ready to be told. It is a dynamic research, with no hierarchies, intentionally disarming. Galegati Shines reconsiders the space, she uses the London mode of the moving walls, creating a not only visual but also conceptual turn over, conceived to constantly focus and set the gaze. Functional to her idea of collection. She does not use selective criteria to describe her research but she uses open and horizontal ones, in a simple and clean way. She puts things together, she proposes her own vision: disenchant and irony and a lucid, bittersweet and honest point of view of the contemporary society, dealing with a distracted and superficial routine where it is always needed to “place ourselves”.
You are not my sweet skater collects a series of shots starting from 2006, a long array of writings on shirts and various garments, with the common feature to be part of an indefinite awareness, sometimes conscious, sometimes not. We do not know how intentional might be to bear words, we do not know the perception in being forerunner of the message within. Yet there is a remark on language. As for some words written with no sense, as the useless posts on social networks looking for approvals or the claims of mass media destined to nothing. Empty and useless words as soap balls, not bearing the magic though but only the inconsistency. The artist questions on all the wasted words, on the abuse of words we have lost the strength of, raped and mangles, debased and contracted. Galegati Shines seeks the importance of language, its strong sense that establishes culture, the happiness of its affirmation. The tongue set free that for Elias Canetti meant “awareness” , opposition to the lose of it, opposition against ignorance and the traps that sometimes demolish the identity of people. This work expresses the beauty of mastering a language, to share it, to learn it, to teach it in its entirety, with all the secrets, knowledge considered freedom and true independence.The photo series Bar sport, retrieves three shots of an empty and bare bar; anonymous and secondary space, abandoned. Images edited with the artists’ sharpened gaze, introducing figure of sleeping men. She depicts sleeping ghosts lost in the indifference torpor. What are they doing there? They might be sentinels using sleep as antidote, deleting the equation “anonymous=ugly”; they become customer of the findings, trying to spot beauty where there is not. As it might happen even in a bare and empty bar.
Gli illuminati is a series of four pictures, oil on cardboard, of sleeping men. Stefania Galegati Shines uses the painting technique, the most traditional one, to reproduce the notes taken from her iconographic repertoire, made of stories and people. She introduces warm and clear color, intense, an irregular shape as memories are and a tridimensional element that makes the differemce: a bright crystal jabbed in the middle of the head, a gash that in the crystal purity materialize a need, preserving from torpor, celebratig the intellect, the Aristotelian and active one, never definable, but perfect instrument to understand the world.
In the middle of the exhibition path Galegati Shines places Inside Outside Upside Down (Landscape for my brother), installation with a hidden and precious small work. An essential round table, under it there is a soft clear carpet, inducing to rest. To see it properly you must stop and bend. You must look and find, go beyond intentionally. What you can not see is a whole world, a microcosm waiting to be discovered. There is a depicted landscape, circular, foggy as the one from Romagna, the one of Galegati’s childhood, a bit Leopardi like. A landscape never existed maybe, that is only inside those bearing an intimate and reassuring vision, belonging to an indefinite time, evoking past memories where to feel home.
Within this exhibition there are two outsiders, the disarming element, independent works but perfect in a fluid context like this: Tremate tremate le streghe son tornate and Infinito. The first is a serial print depicting a woman with a vaguely alluring smile, elusive. On her back Galegati Shines underlines with a marker, endlessly repeating it, the sentence title of the work; a short text that grasps and boost that uncertain smile, moking those who observe it. It seems to warn on falsity of some behaviours, of excessively benevolent behaviours, not scrimping anyone yet that do not admit you within its “salotto buono”. A typical procedure of a small culture, not used to breathe the air of the world, that has the same breeze for everyone, air that makes cooler and tones up. Infinito is a double oval painting of two unknowns reminding to the mysterious interest of Galegati Shine for graveyards. The artist used the old memory of a visit to the Verano Cemetery in Rome. She works accurately on an image taken years before. The work depicts husband and wife, next to each other in life and death, bearer of an never ending link and a bit antiquated. In a moment where nothing seems to last, as human relations, the artist shouts her against the grain culture, reminding the value of relations, making them the focus of interest. Galegati examines the fragility and the importance to determine feelings. With her irriverent acuity she affirms the sense of her thinking, with an open and not simplified language.
The exhibition is closed by Tuttifrutti: the video is a complete immersion within another element and as for all the immersion, instruments are needed for the transit. One of them, as for all the exhibition, is once again disenchantment. Without it, it is not possible to enter the phenomenology of feelings turning over in Galegati Shines’ research. Tuttifrutti is the portrait of a reality very close to reality tv programs moving forward a disorientation hardly able to to recognize limits, excess, chances and needs. It is a story of images, with a perfect soundtrack, picking scenes of people’s marriages, highlighting strong social contraditions between to be and showing off. The characters in the video are looking for a place that it is clearly not their natural one, everything is surreal: atmosphere, behaviours, movements, objects, food. Everything looks defaced by the unawareness… these young couples start their life together, passing by an air chamber that will make their return to real life impossible. Banquets worthy of Trimalchio, crazy dances, behaviours reproducing models and out of reach etiquette. Tuttifrutti in its paradox celebrates the naive and happy casualness of our own real chances, celebrates the disenchantment with, even for a few hours, everything is possible and real. The desire of being nicer, richer, more elegant, happier passes by the tale par excellence, the marriage, the step to the adult life, that summarizes dreams and hopes in future. Respecting these hopes, real and pure, Galegati Shines, with her clean eye, frees the story from any judgement, exalting the absurdity, making it ironic and moving. On one side the hope for a better life, through the party, on the other the awareness that nothing changes and that everything will be “reality”, even if just for one day.
