Emblema, Francolino, Scodro

Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is glad to present the show Emblema, Francolino, Scodro, which will take place in the new headquarters of the gallery in via Settembrini 17, Milan. In these new headquarters, located in a stylish 1920’s building in the Porta Venezia area, the gallery, founded in 2006, will open a new cycle of exhibitions.

The show offers a comparison among three artists from different generations – Emblema, is from the Sixties-Seventies generation, while Francolino and Scodro from the current one. The main purpose is to highlight the dialogue between generations on the basis of the artists’ research, which shares a similar take on the fundamental elements of artwork such as space – pictorial or sculptural space – color, matter and light.

Secondly, the common connection that the three artists have with land, considered from a sustainable point of view, is the cultural background capable of projecting a certain kind of ecological sensitivity in a long-term perspective, which spans from the Post-War period until today.

A text by Denis Isaia accompanies the show. By comparing the three artists, the critic traces, in the modern manner in which Emblema, Francolino and Scodro operate, the progressive substantiation of shape, that is the emergence of a fil rouge between abstract exploration of modernism and the insistent emergence of reality in a figurative key. By favoring the interpretation in transparency of space by Salvatore Emblema, the text pauses, in particular, on the emergence of landscape and naturalistic energies, which show, beginning from the Sixties, the coexistence of the object and of tautological orthodoxy with the unwilling establishment of poetry and every day gestural expression.

Salvatore Emblema is the first in chronological order who has applied to painting his sensitivity for nature by projecting the profile of the Vesuvian landscape on the surface of the painting, which, with the practice of “de- weaving”, is seen as space – light. Matter is an important key to interpretation and is reflected in the use of rough jute fabric and in color made with Vesuvian soil. On display are a core of works from the Eighties and Nineties, which witness his walking backwards from minimalism to the emergence of figuration, dense with matter and mixed with sign.

At the core of Andrea Francolino’s art practice is the crevice, which is a fracture, a wound and a collapse in an all-around reflection on a subject which is studied under the aesthetics, ethics and ecology profile. On display are also a series of artworks made with glass, (Caso x Caos x Infinite Variabili) where one can attribute opposite polarities to a fixture: order and disorder, empty and full. Of the three artists, he is the one whose pictorial work takes the features of a conceptual reflection space, which becomes either absolute matter or absolute transparency.

Close to Emblema, as for the reflection on space, but, above all, for the transformation of the materials offered by natural space is Alberto Scodro; an artist deeply rooted to the nature of the Veneto countryside, where he comes from and lives. He creates site-specific sculptures and installations that are devices revealing the strength of nature. Some of these works are displayed by the artist in the gallery. At the core of his sculptural practice is the research on matter transformation processes, where the focus is on the aggregation of minerals in purpose-built kilns. On display some Mineral Grass, actual body – nature, landscape transforming into sculpture, blossoming mineral shaped with color, light and pure matter.