• The Circles

By now, ‘my golden discs’ are the stylistic signature of my works and are meant to be a reference to both the inner world and Plato's World of Ideas.
The circle is a symbol of infinity, immutability, completeness, Eternity (and eternal return) and of Creation. I love this geometric figure very much, also for the ancestral significance it has.
The world we live in, the stars we come from, the planets, the egg that gave us birth, are all more or less perfectly circular in shape. It is a familiar, atavistic shape, inherent in us.
My' circles are not perfect.
There are no perfect circles in nature, although in an abstract and theoretical way we can conceive them, calculate their dimensions and perceive their Idea.
By their imperfection, I want to emphasise precisely this aspect: they cannot be perfect because they belong to ‘our’ earthly, human, finite world. They are the reflection of images, Ideas, which are perfect and which, as Plato would say, exist in the Hyperuranium and are perceived by us in a nebulous and incomplete way, with the intellect or with the depth of our innermost feeling. And this is my role as an artist and the purpose of the art I have as a gift, in the words of Paul VI: ‘to take from the sky of the spirit its treasures and clothe them with words, colours, forms, accessibility...’. In other words: translating into a finite and sensorially perceptible language what is the exact opposite, infinite and not ‘tangible’ by our five human senses.
In the specific case of this exhibition, in addition to gold discs, silver discs are observable, especially in ‘Memoirs of Heaven’. In fact, I wanted to use chrome ink to evoke the reflection effect that is typical of mirrors, to suggest the idea that ‘we are in the stars’. The viewer, in fact, can theoretically reflect himself in those star-discs and realise that he too belongs to the celestial dimension represented.

• The Salt

In many works in this collection you will find grains of salt. This element has accompanied my artistic research for a long time now and was also the subject of my diploma thesis at the Brera Academy.
Besides allowing me to create peculiar effects when used with watercolours or watercolours in general, it is also a symbol particularly rich in meaning. Due to its physical characteristics, salt preserves and conserves, it is important food for human sustenance and is the element that brings flavour and enriches.
Many artists have cited it in their works, from Leonardo in his ‘Last Supper’ to Anselm Kiefer in his exhibition ‘Salt of the Earth’ at the Magazzini del Sale in Venice; and many use it directly in their works such as Motoi Yamamoto or Bettina Werner.
In the context of this exhibition, I used it to emphasise the need for conservation. If with my paintings I have managed to ‘recover’ certain Memories of Heaven, it is necessary to preserve them in order to pass them on like photographs in a family album. What better than salt, which is both a preservative and a memory of ancient oceans and seas that have disappeared, could preserve, protect and ‘ferry’ our ancestral memories into the future?

• The Tears

You might notice that some of my paintings on paper are torn.
It is an action I perform on purpose, not to destroy the finished work that does not meet my personal standards as an artist, but rather to communicate an entirely different concept.
It should be pointed out that I tear up the surface I work on before starting work; I could consider it an action that is part of the preparation to receive the paint layer. This act carries with it a symbolic charge that becomes part of the work itself. The tearing emphasises that what we have in front of us is part of something larger, not visible, in a certain way ‘absent’ to our senses.
As a predominantly painterly artist, as already mentioned, my mission is to translate into visual language something that even I cannot fully comprehend. The works I create are but shreds, small pieces, fragments, of a wonderfully unimaginable Something that I can barely touch with my artistic sensibility.
Those that you can see in this exhibition are therefore fragments of a greater reality that I perceive deeply and that I try, in a totally imperfect and incomplete way, to give you in some way to make you perceive how much more unlimited, infinite and eternal there is.
Never was there a crazier, more impossible and infinitely exciting undertaking than that of us artists, the small, astonished storytellers of Inimitable Infinity.

Giulia Calvanese