While these days I am in Salento towards Leuca, I have news of an exhibition by the artist Raffaele Quida who I met years ago, and exactly in 2012, when I presented one of his exhibitions in Florence.
Now the Gigi Rigliaco Gallery to Galatinapresents a new solo exhibition by January 31, 2025 Raffaele Quida, from Lecce, entitled “Visual“, which brings together thirteen recent and new project-works in a journey curated by Paola Mancinelli.
It is certain that Raffaele Quida has artistic abilities that have not yet been fully revealed, because today we notice that his work is
still too closely tied to Italian and foreign artists who have worked in this area; in the near future it will have to find its own path without legacies or references of any kind. Beyond the installations that have now infected art far and wide, a path that is still viable is colour, monochrome, monochromatic forms, open and closed forms, and more. Exploring art also with materials linked to the territory and above all the presence of history.
The artist has conceived stations that follow the perimeter and inhabit the area of the exhibition space, with which he questions the boundaries between art and architecture, vision and action: the relationship between the works is in an essential order, according to a progressive conceptual and material design in total adherence to the environment.
The exhibition “Visual” follows to “Breakthroughs in time” last spring at the Monogao 21 Gallery in Ravenna, where the latest results from the “Time cards” And “Surfaces“. Quida he is interested in the categories of time in the mutation and transmutation of matteras the founding nucleus of his artistic research. In practice uses both natural and artificial materialsin this case widely used in the construction and chemical industry, chosen for their versatility and contrasts, of opacity or transparency and based on the different weight densities, treating them by virtue of their
capacity for transformation and dialogue, from iron and lead, to clay and foam rubber, thermal sheets and pigments, from the ‘poorest’ to gold.
In Galatina, the installations on the wall, in the corners and on the floor are the result of a study of perspective planes, of the movement and forces that act on the masses of a body and of how these universally shared norms are able to translate into visual stimulation. Central to these works is the incidence of lightfrom the daylight to that of a projector, capable of crossing or imprinting itself on surfaces and modeling volumes, which also motivates the choice of other materials, such as plexiglass or carbon paper including baryta photographic paper, to carry out a analysis and measurement of the phenomena of luminosity and of perception that goes beyond the sphere of the non-visible.
The public is invited to actively participate in the exhibition scene, for a deeper and more conscious aesthetic understanding that goes beyond the act of seeing: it becomes a tangible experience ofimmersive environment “Image and absence“, «which generates a projection of landscapes and sensorial viaticums» writes the curator, or lets yourself walk along the 4 and a half meter walkway of the work “Your weight“, which the spectator can freely modify with his own body. The itinerary of the exhibition “Visual” is based on a very precise communication flow, oriented towards the experience of physical surfacesshape memory.
«Quida’s works are steeped in memory», states Paola Mancinelli, «outside the curtain of redundancy, they emerge from another time, bearers of a poetics that reveals and hides, suspends and condenses, crystallizes and fixes in a precise segment. By working on matter, the artist transforms space into a story, a metaphor that refers to the alternation of the cycles of nature, fluid and malleable, in close relationship with the user».
On the occasion of the inauguration on Saturday 14 December at 6 pm, the artist proposed the performative intervention “Balance” with the involvement of Arianna Gaballo, an interaction between the stations with the works displayed to break the static nature of the objects and thus show the mysterious poetic becoming of things.
Accompany your visit with the catalog published by Danilo Montanari Editore.
Carlo Franza