Artists

The artists who inhabit the space of La Nuvola Gallery, both historical and contemporary, are distinguished by a common tension towards the avant-garde. In the case of the former, it is an experimentation investigated in the decades from the 1960s to the 1980s, from a pictorial, sculptural and installation point of view. It is a direct testimony of a historical period and of a relationship, also human, woven with the most relevant names of that era.
As far as the selection of contemporary authors is concerned, the Gallery’s objective is manifested in its desire to give expressive space to new names, already established or emerging, on the national and international scene, in order to broaden the art market towards both innovation and new research.

Artists

historical

Carla Accardi

“In Accardi’s painting, the stroke, with its fragmentation, its thickening into sign galaxies of chromatic goodness, becomes the main vehicle of knowledge and transmission of content. From the very first draft, these chromatic signs appear tangled, almost an existential symbol, an integral part of the artist’s own life: “Art and life for me were at a parallel distance, because on the one hand I mythologised Art, I considered it in a very high way; on the other hand I tended to demythologise it, I wanted to find out what was behind it and above all I wanted people not to be so stuck in front of the work, it seemed too automatic a position to me, I wanted the public to be shaken up, to love Art by discovering that there was life behind it, by realising that life could be united as they had already done in other epochs, but mainly because I wanted to be contemporary with my century, with my era, I wanted to find out what contemporaneity really was”.

from “Carla Accardi” edited by Roberta Bernabei, Editalia, 2013

Franco Angeli

“Angeli’s images, situated between words and things, follow one another in tight sequences: elusive, erratic, perturbing, they dazzle and stimulate the mind, through individual and collective memory.
They place themselves in an intermediate zone, between the perceptible and the intelligible dimension. Some get caught up in them, indeed, they seize us. Others disappear behind the veils from which they have emerged: the moment we try to grasp them, they seem to consume us’.

Larvatus prodeo. The Body and the Mask.
Critical text by Laura Cherubini
from “Franco Angeli. Works 1958 – 1988”.
Franco Angeli

Afro Basaldella

“I have always deeply loved Afro’s painting, because in Afro’s painting there is painting, there is real painting, but there is also a regret of painting, a nostalgia for painting. I don’t know if I can render the idea, but the painting is there because it is looking for something else, it has a nostalgia for something else. And so I always thought that Afro adored painting as one might adore a castle, for example Kafka’s castle, a miraculous castle, far away, inside which one cannot enter, one cannot cross the drawbridge to that castle’.

Per Afro (1997), critical text by Toti Scialoja, from Afro’s General Catalogue, edited by Mario Graziani

Mirko Basaldella

“The substantial meaning of Mirko’s work, in his cycle, can be seen in the profound persuasion and inspiration of man as lived time and the soul as memory, in the tension towards a perennial addition to draw an ever greater truth of oneself”.

The Mirko Foundation for Florence (1979),
critical text by Carlo L. Ragghianti

Mario Ceroli

“Ceroli stands as ‘I was there’ (Italian pun between the artist’s surname and ‘c’ero lì’, in English ‘I was there’), in that precise instant, as hic et nunc, as the ascertainment of the presence and noema of life. It is through the creative act that the artist wants to stop time, giving it form and sculpting a moment, while leaving it free in its abysmal infiniteness”.

Mario Ceroli. I was there with Pinocchio (2019), critical text by Alice Falsaperla

Piero Dorazio

Dorazio’s main muse was poetry, not formalism. Poetry not only in the literal sense, but also that which manifests itself in its musical and radiant chromatic textures and warps, and in its intention to emphasise how metaphysical, psychological and fantastic possibilities are immanent in materiality.
The perfect image of beauty that the Anglo-American T.S. Eliot proposes in an early poem, ‘The Weeping Daughter’, amounts to an ekphrasis of the artist’s concepts.
Eliot fuses a cosmic dimension (the sun) with human qualities (his imaginary lover who, of course, embodies material radiance): ‘Tessi, tessi la luce del sole nei tuoi capelli’.
Dorazio himself used a similar trope: ‘the texture is never composed of a single colour […]. What I wanted to achieve was an indefinable coloured light’.
To describe works employing the latter technique Dorazio chose the noun ‘weft’, the ambiguity of which lies in the fact that it refers to both the world of textiles and that of writing. […] The range of Dorazio’s horizons and their unfolding in the panoply of his cyclic but ever-changing art was, to say the least, an immense imaginative space. The 1960s obediently opened a window on his kaleidoscope. ”

“Immensity” by Davide Anfam,
From “Piero Dorazio. La Nuova Pittura”
edited by Francesco Tedeschi. Skira Publisher
Tano Festa

Tano Festa

Another one, here’s Festa!
Once like a gallant sailing ship
felt its prow,
foaming with sea rage
I ploughed all the seas.
Then
In returning to my shores
at a short distance from the shore
the keel was ploughed
over a shoal.
Every day the waves
of the waves lapping
the now immobile hull
slowly corrode it
with the salt spray that crusts over it.
At night the high tide submerges me
and the next day the sailing ship reappears
ever whiter and bluer

to blend with the glare of the sun
and from the shore no one sees it
even if I

/ glimpse the shore
with the figures waving there
the light boats
that break away from fragile jetties

for short and predestined trips
so with a safe return
even if the fresh and dry pops
from the newly hoisted sails
would suggest different voyages
with destinations to be set

and so every day and every night

until a tide
from other dark and more insidious and dense
will shatter the vessel
that a slow and astonished burst
Will slowly drop to the bottom
/spreading
its fragments
among the algae and cuttlefish bones

and the other marine debris
which the morning current
will finally bring to shore
to settle on the gravel
glistening in the sun
/of the shoreline.

The Ghost Ship. Poem by Tano Festa from Tano Festa. Poems.
Polygraph Publishing House. 2021

Giosetta Fioroni

Giosetta Fioroni is a person who walks in a very light-hearted way: sometimes, unseen, when she is in a bit of a hurry, she hops around like a schoolgirl who wants to make up for lost time through lightness.
These little hops and certain shakes of the hair with the fingers do not make up for lost time, neither for going to school nor for living, they do, however, completely recover the time of inspiration and its feeling, so indispensable today in figurative art.

Goffredo Parise, 1975 on Giosetta Fioroni, in Giosetta Fioroni
edited by Germano Celant, Skira Editore, 2009

Sergio Lombardo

“Sergio Lombardo (Rome 1939), a multifaceted and chameleon-like artist, art critic, psychologist and founder of the Eventualist Theory, made his debut at a very young age, historically in the late 1950s.

His artistic investigation, which straddles innovation, aesthetics and scientific research, has been the subject of analysis and in-depth study by scholars of various kinds who, individually and collectively, have worked alongside the artist since his debut, continuing with the foundation of the Jartrakor Research Centre.

“My work is about finding the right tools to provoke meaningful behaviour in the audience. It is not preservable; it is unrepeatable and unpredictable compared to the automatic uniformity of expectations. The present is a creative act, a choice that divides the past from the future. Art is a manifestation of the present, for it is distinguished by its inconstancy’.

Sergio Lombardo. Aleatory experimentation in the Lead Years, from university research by Alice Falsaperla

Renato Mambor

“The knowledge process elaborated by Mambor’s work concerns not only the state of technical complexity, but also internal drives and further needs that belong to an idea of the world.
Mambor’s maturity requires a broadened technical expertise, and at the same time a mentality that does not believe in the integration of art and life, but rather in the possibility of creating a work that is also made out of fluctuating interstices between the elaborated forms of art and the pre-existing forms of life.
In this way, the work becomes that Heideggerian place that is not contemplated frontally like an old sculpture, but the reserve field of a language capable of creating an actual dwelling in which the viewer can float and breathe.”

On loan from infinity. Art, Symmetry and Order. Critical text by Achille Bonito Oliva, from MAMBOR,
Christian Maretti Editore, 2009

Pino Pascali

“Perhaps, further out to sea, there are whales, sailing ships and sharks. There, bigger stories begin, the truths of Moby Dick. It would take a stronger body, a more heretical courage. At least a mask and snorkel, a robotic armour that could reach everywhere, immune to time and injury. The dream of changing skin, of magically leaving behind one’s exposed side to the world. He would need a dagger to defend himself from the abyss, perhaps a screw as a handle that would turn the tip towards him, to dig and investigate into the depths of himself’.

Pino Pascali. Fuori Museo (2022),
critical text by Alice Falsaperla

Achille Perilli

“This is why sign is Achille Perilli’s starting point, distinguishing himself from the icy and now outdated monema, welcoming the monochrome in place of the neutral field and indulging the unconscious.
All together, these elements are enclosed in a new circularity, in an eternal return that has no exclusions, because it knows it cannot make a hierarchy of everything: from informal to form, from form to image, from image to sign, from sign to trace, from trace to memory, from memory to the unconscious, from the unconscious to poetry”.

Achille Perilli (2018), critical text by Alice Falsaperla
Cesare Tacchi

Cesare Tacchi

Maurizio Calvesi: “The meaning of Spring is what I have elaborated on in a recent, long article in my magazine, Storia dell’Arte.
In a short space I can only indicate the fundamental points. The three graceful maidens dancing in front of Venus are not the Graces as is believed but the Hours: you can be sure of that.
It is like reading the gesture of Venus who, looking at the dancing Hours, extends the palm of her hand towards them, as if to say: Halt? Yes, she actually says Halt! She stops the dance of the Hours, that is, she stops time.
In a classic ‘happy island’, she lives an eternal spring; on the side, Mercury with his caduceus, holds back the clouds and prevents them from entering the sky that will always remain clear.
Zephyrus, on the other side, lands the Ovidian Clori, who, speaking, emits roses and flowers from her perfumed lips, discussing her own transformation into Flora: who is next door.
Cesare Tacchi: L’immobilità determina la sospensione del tempo, dell’umano.
Io vedo in quel dipinto una forte ambiguità; le figure sono femminili, ma allo stesso tempo, non nascondono alcuni tratti maschili. Vedo una sorta di “en travesti”. Ed è per questo che la mia Primavera la intitolai “La Primavera Allegra”!.
Per me quei personaggi della Primavera non fermano il tempo, ma lo stanno passando, si stanno distraendo perché la distrazione è l’asse del mondo, e il gioco ne è il simbolo.

Conversazione tra il Prof. Maurizio Calvesi e Cesare Tacchi da Cesare Tacchi. I Guardiani della Primavera Pop.
Galleria La Nuvola, 2007

Mario Schifano

The artist, whether of image or word, is the one who accepts this transfer with the naturalness of his imagination. By means of the tools of his language, he produces quick shifts and natural displacements, made possible by a creative omnipotence that gives the status of reality to every unreality.
2Art is to bring reality into the state of impossibility, to balance the negative weight of things with the extracted lightness of fantasy. This is possible given the positive irresponsibility of the artist who does not recognise reality as a definitive condition but one of movement and transformation.
Art is to declare the leopard white, to make the mountains climb the desert, to bring their altitudes back to the pitch plane of painting and savannah. It is also to ensure this spatial displacement the immortality of time: to preserve the white leopard and its image in the ice of the form, so as to allow it a life in future memory.
And this is what Schifano has always done.

“Borderline Art and the Gaze of the White Leopard M.S.” by Achille Bonito Oliva, from Mario Schifano, edited by Achille Bonito Oliva, Edizioni Charta, 1998