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GIANLUCA PATTI
ONCE UPON A TIME, TODAY…
CURATED BY JESSICA TANGHETTI

Milan, 20.01.21 - 27.02.21

“Aion pais esti paizon, pessevon paido he basileie”
“Time is a child playing dice: a child’s kingdom”
[Heraclitus, Fragment B52]

Once upon a time, today… is the narration of a timeless story, originating from the simplest and founding elements at the basis of the individual expression and development.


Basic human needs, as self-expression and playing, primary colours and elementary forms, immanent and innate in the individual and collective development, are expressed by the artist in a kaleidoscope of colour, energy and dynamism. Colours break in fluctuating, both in the, apparently, monochrome pieces [Frequencies series], and in the multicolour ones [Noise series], manifesting themselves so powerfully to invade their resined borders, becoming image in the interiority of the viewer. The pictorial work rises up to a stratified system, where the representation of today displayed by the colour meets the past, narrated by the layering of the materials behind the artworks’ surface. Ante becomes Nunc in a continuous dialogue between past and present, where colour and stratification are tools for reflecting on time and contemporaneity.


Gianluca Patti’s work invites us to a five sense fruition to perceive “the sentiments, and the nostalgia, that soul feels in front of the colours’’, as taught by Rudolf Steiner, but with childlike naturalness and purity. The ludic dimension is central and at the basis of the artist’s research, representing the result of the encounter between Spieltrieb and Kunsttrieb, the urgency/instinct of playing and the urgency/instinct of art in the words of philosopher Friedrich Schiller. Game does not represent lightness, but the founding and timeless tool of personal growth, never ending initiation of the observation of the world. The artist’s work aims to involve the Heraclitean pais paizon of the viewer, stimulating them in seeking answers and interpretations of open scenarios, as it happens in the installations Frequencies and The Game, where the encounter between art and game is a tool for emphasizing the most intimate childlike side of the spectator.


And thus the artist’s work becomes evocative of a fairytale dimension, made of traces of the past and contemporary fragments, relating each other in an exultation of games, forms and colours. Necessarily following an amoral approach, the intimate artist’s tale becomes, on various levels of interpretation, everyone’s story, floating between real and oneiric dimensions. Art serves as a starting point for countless fairytales inviting to the amor fati, infinite open narrations with endless epilogues…