The Painting of Giuseppe Galli

Like a flash perceived by the trained eye of a reporter, Giuseppe Galli’s painting develops and takes shape as a body of work whose story is told and appreciated through the abundance of details of every day chance events. Galli has established an art which is assembled and explained in a professional and serious manner. It is a reflected image of a particular type of sensibility which concentrates primarily on the setting of gathered impressions stretched to the immediate perception of a particular reality and elaborated in the visual intuition of an instant. This has then been perspectively annotated to the specific case with the aim to examine, define, and find the solution which eludes us. This artist’s painting can be defined as immediate; as a vibrating impression capable of grasping casualness and anticipating comparisons in a sampling chosen with the agnostic impartiality of a film editing machine. This is an important characteristic which allows him to develop his painting animated by passionate colours where Attardi orange and bright yellow dominate and to originally define his work on more than just the chromatic level. In this way Galli has invented a positive and current artistic solution, evocative in its own way of avant-garde myths but, nonetheless, convincing and exalting both for the statement context as well as for  pure and simple observation. The paintings are, therefore, composed on the canvas with the reality of real life, conceding little to digression but rather concentrating themselves skillfully on the game of perspectives and the volumes of selected subjects. These subjects, for better or worse, have been experienced with a consistency which the artist is able to transmit on a visual level in the dynamic following of effects. The car cemetery, the diggers or the cranes silhouetted against the sky with their promises of construction, the much loved scooters on which men like centaurs engage in amorous embraces, displaying their rebellious masculinity, rather uselessly laid to waste. None of the subjects are chosen by chance but are identified and suggested as an example of the essence of a fact, be it lyric, constructive or bloody. Strange but true, in his painting there exists a note of deep and poetic eurhythmy, for example in the peaceful back-drop of the mountains used as a background in the manner of Bellini. This eurhythmy can be found in the use of colours passionately joined together , in the intertwining of their piercing variety, in the chromatic strength of the vehicles and in the ferrous authority of the building scaffolds. All of this denotes a worthy and winning painting style which transmits completed action onto the canvas and, in the few glimpses of landscape, raises an ecological cry of pain to the sky, lamenting the blind technical intrusion which continues to destroy nature. This destruction is demonstrated in the portrayals of the fully developed excavations in “Quelli del Giubileo” (Those of the Jubilee) and later in the disappearance of his pathetic Roman roofs. Hidden behind an apparent tribute to industrialization is a heartfelt cry, (an inoffensive accusation thanks to his great professional elegance) for all that necessarily fails to reach its objectives. Galli’s capacity for expression on this subject is understood through subjects of great civil delicacy and strong ethical and social duty. To these the painter often adds a noble note when, exalting the progress of construction techniques without underestimating the risk of devastation, he pays tribute to the indispensability of renewal while at the same time making us regret everything that irremediably passes away never to return. It is precisely in this complex and ambitious balance between research,  recent events and veiled accusations wherein resides the “quid”, that which firmly places Galli among the young emerging artists, in an artist’s proof which is profoundly new, but full of resources and promise. 

Ferdinando Anselmetti

 The Man Machine relationship and the Future

City changes anticipated by colours and poetry - A painter who is not yet forty, at the beginning of this new century, once again presents us with the relationship between man and machine. The painter is Giuseppe Galli, from Rome, born in 1964. When Fernand Leger (1881-1955) painted “Les Constructeurs” (The Construction Workers) in 1950, he was not yet born. The machine-man, or vice versa, question is very old, dating back to before the invention of the wheel, a development of the rotating trunk which revolutionised human labour. Throughout his work, with both feeling and science, Leger managed to give painting a sense of presence in society using the image of the machine. Many of his paintings are “portraits” of machines, painted as if they were people. The futuristic man-machine expressed an idea of dynamics at the time of the aesthetic revolt of anti-figurativism. An “anti-futurist”, “post-futurist futurist, he said, Alberto Bragalia (1896-1985) was one of those who gave feeling to artificial “mechanisms”. The world is full of precedents because man has used the machine, to the point of abusing it like Cain’s club. We can only remind the reader how the generation which came before cellular telephones and internet (other machines from the community of man) looks at today, seeing what Giuseppe Galli paints: the relationship between artificial mechanisms and the man-soul. Galli’s paintings visibly narrate man’s adventure in the city as both conqueror and victim of traffic, a situation which he himself has created and that he must live with. The relevance of these paintings does not lie in their subjects. These may seem irritating in present day: a scooter at an intersection which is crossed by a bus labeled Atac (we must, therefore, be in Rome) upon which the man, because he is depicted from behind, is basically rendered null; a tow-truck in a traffic jam in front of ancient Roman ruins; a bicycle (the red on the frame is a visual lash which looks like a bulls eye on the yellow) chained to a road sign while a lorry marked Audi, 4x4, 428B, “maia” and “cat” (numbers and letters on the digger) approaches. This is a painting which would impress even the masters of Letterism (1950s). A red crane rises in “Cantieri del Giubileo” (Jubilee Dig), the visual moments which marked the beginning of Galli’s urban reading. Red (subconscious or intentional hearkening back to the blood caused by accidents on the roads or in the excavations?) and yellow, uncovered symbol, are the vital alarm which this artist gives us as his particular visual code. Giuseppe Galli has often made the machine a product of man’s inventiveness with his own solitude, and this is the essence of his contribution to the progress of the man-machine relationship. Through him we are almost at the beginning of automation. We are on the robot trail. Perhaps one day this creation will not obey its creator’s wishes and will rebuild itself. These are things we already find in fantascience fiction. These paintings provoke a strange feeling in us, like a warning. It is the historical relevance of Galli’s paintings that makes us think and reflect during his shows, at the same time as we are enjoying the obvious quality of his work. Today’s man almost feels that the mysterious kinship he feels with the machine is a brotherhood. If an engine is not working well we say it is “suffering”. If it runs well we say it is “singing”. We “listen to” the engine, just as once we listened to the squeaking of the wagon to understand the problem. This relationship is a mystery which is spreading in today’s society and it is bringing us to the stars. The machine can “slip out of the hands” of the constructor. Such is the unpredictable autonomy of an accident. This, and more, can be found in the paintings of Giuseppe Galli, the man who makes the progeny of man come to life and become living beings complete unto themselves. In contemporary and future painting he provokes a spontaneously new type of landscape: automobiles replace cows and cranes and scaffolding replace trees. Is this the landscape of the future? We hope for a fusion with an anticipation of poets and painters. Giuseppe Galli is already on his way.  

Giuseppe Selvaggi 

 A Passion Which Becomes Art  

The influence of the automobile on modern man’s daily life is so great that it often conditions his life. In fact, the relationship between man and automobile almost becomes a subjection, but it is also an act of love because the automobile, more than a mere tool, is often also a status symbol which, as such, is capable of altering its owner’s behaviour.  Giuseppe Galli is obviously aware of this connection because he concentrates his art on the representation of this man-automobile relationship at various times in life. He travels around the city and looks at the monuments and the people with motorised transport. Their respective architectural and psychological appearance then calls his attention to important artistic reflections. He paints the daily frenzy as it relates to recreation and work which have become a slave to this frenzy. The motorcyclist who waits impatiently at the stoplight contrasts with the serenity of the pedestrian on the crosswalk and the car’s body becomes one with the man because it is conceived and painted with the colours of the passion one feels at the purring of the engine and the quivering of the steel sheets of the frame. Galli understands the relationship between the shades of colour and alters them in accordance with the movement (or lack thereof) of the representation. There where feeling wins over matter it is the colour which wins and grants the deaf metal matter a soul which it itself does not possess but which has been conceded by the artist with the generosity of one who can see the end in the means. The city which passes along side of the driver takes on a composite worth which projects the presence of the passer-by almost as if it is saying that it is the future, the one who understands life and you are the clearest and strongest witness. For this impressive foray into the most populated metropolitan centres, Galli manages to isolate his vision and propose elements which take on a mystery bordering on the magical, even those which are of an obvious and well known nature. They lose their identity and become subjects of a future underneath which extends the speed of the motorcycle. He does this with a sure stroke, with relevant colours and sapient composition. The special care which he devotes to the depiction of the vehicles and to their detailing is not likewise devoted to the depiction of the human figures. These latter, in fact, rarely have a face and appear to be less important players in the scene, unless one imagines an osmosis between man and automobile so that the painting takes on a value as a united whole betraying the personality of the artist as wanting to represent the whole rather than the parts. It seems like man and automobile have come from the same veins in which blood or petrol flows. They appear to live off of this fusion of matter, vivified by the artist with shapes and colours supported by a sign which encloses everything in the construction of his ideal world. It is a style of painting which uses its basis in reality to reach the imagination, but it is also an expression of the existentialist philosophy which Galli himself imposes to seal his images. It is not the peacefulness of certain images which marks the passage of the painting, but rather the constant tension which emerges from the scanning of colour enclosed in sweet hems which highlight the consistency of bodies. In these, however, one can feel the wandering of the impulse of tense souls not only to love but also to live their lives. While the Roman school of painting influences Galli’s palette, he does not allow himself to be dominated by it because he knows how to use nuances and cold colours which infuse the scene with a nostalgia which affects the artist at the precise moment he begins to paint. If he loves art, he loves engines no less and therefore the figures which emerge are a mixture of wishes and imagination which become the soul which vibrates in every corner of his canvases. It is a painting style which, supported by a good predisposition for drawing, technical preparation, and strong sense of colour, is able to interpret with simplicity and relevance the needs of a society which, more than of man, is a civilization of automobiles.                                                                                                                  

Gianni Franceschetti 

The Pictures of Giuseppe Galli

“Centaurus of two thousand”

  The ancient Greek told tales some centaurs, men with the body of horse, however strong, but dominators in everything of the feral part, gifted rather of a superior wisdom to the commune: the symbol, in last analysis, of the dominion of the rational part on the sensitive part, even though multiplied, increased, without comparison in comparison to that of the other men. “Centaurus”  are today’s men in the pictorial works of Giuseppe Galli to the steering wheel of a mooped, that increases them in theirs it persuades of move and subject to their dominion. But the comparison, to an analysis some deepened, doesn’t hold up. The dominion of the mean mechanic is only apparent. The car practices such a suggestion on the spirit of the men that in many cases not the tool  and to the service  of the rational being but the rational being to the service of the tool. The painter Galli intends to represent the cars that belong to that aggressive, shining, roaring phenomenon that calls traffic. Him “it describes” the hostile building machineries, the vehicles to four wheels of which the man uses for strengthening his strength, to participate in the big collective competition of the life, and to become a slave to the agitated rhythm that the civilization today’s he imposes. Let’s observe nearby her from, these cars: a procession of boxes of metal that advances rumbling, thick it clogs to lines, and crossed by brief winces of arrangement; to moments it separates him in rapid, and hot tempered snakes of metal are recomposed again then a proceed, mighty, toward, choked entry of a great artery liberator. To the intern of this procession the men emerge only with the head, the back, the hands, enslaved to the command as halved centaurs, the contracted muscular energy, the desire of pure air mortified from the odor from asphalt, of the gasoline, of the red-hot metal, the contact with the nature distorted by the imprisonment of the cabin of guide but at the same time sure, satisfied and bold. The metropolitan histories that Giuseppe Galli tells us concern the daily life. Anybody trace of fiction doesn’t exist in its pictures, only the pure one, simple reality. The reality exemplified and cultured under the impulse of the immediate feeling. Ready to return in more following times through the memory, the memory, the form the sketch the color the emotion. Space and time. The primary attempt of Galli and that to represent the space in her totality. To him it doesen’t interest the subject, or it doesn’t interest  better the classical subject emphatic, historical, mytological. To the painter it interests to illustred the space, also limited, in witch the modern man conducts his existence made of details, of particularly thrilling events not, of it so much less touching or epic. The photographic use that Galli make of his painting, the sure perspective and the reported canvas up to the edges in the least details not to remove anything from the vision that the artist has struck, the color that as if he had to plot an tapestry he insinuates him in every “hole” and to fill completely fragment of the painting, damage to the space and the time of Galli another breath. The painter individualizes the visual field to put to fire and chooses the objects and the figures to put to fire. The attention of the artist Galli it doesn’t limit him to the space, but it also detains him with inquiring look on the istant that winds it, and it determines it in her on his oneness. It strikes in the pictures the relation ship of studied harmony of surfaces and figures, the almost cinema cut, and he anchors the tones mixed of reflexes the space that opens in the soft light, that seems to wind every thing. In all the works Galli is strengthens the metropolitan story with the tick and sure color, sober and once diamond, never aggressive, but suitable to the images; the light serves to the painter to discreetly model the city landscape, objects and figures that they almost hurl out of the canvas to meet the observer.

Livio Garbuglia

Unachievable Symmetries  

It is not difficult to immagine Giuseppe Galli while he is painting a color or a mix of colours on the canvas and carrying images from palette’s abstraction up to the plane space of the painting. The modern artist impressed on rising lines of metropolitan geometries the luring fascination of what, living with us, has become part of us – shaping light on spaces and perimeters that convey memory’s power in a world that is both present and future. With mind’s colour and line man voyages through time, discovering the inner metropolis in its archetypes: bridges wreck in a sunset which can feature the dazzling line at the border of a transcendent definition of its expressive attitudes – the cranes and the buildings, enclosuring light in spaces of progressive radiance convey the idea that every form is a sign of interiority that man can experience from outside to his inner self.

Giuseppe Galli and the Modern

Bridges and overpasses embody spaced color in Giuseppe Galli’s paintings, for which modern gains a memory fashination of its own; also due to the awkward relation ship between the reference in their title and the actual sense of colour occupied by the very colour in a dominion not only made out by perspective. Bridge is the line that really crosses over the borders of sensibility and merges in that twilight light that confers it a style and a beauty outside time. See the tiburtina one for instance.

Giuseppe Galli's ancient element  

Giuseppe Galli reapplies the archetypal principle of the widely varying geometric shapes in space . He achieves this point by making profiled colour fit in a profiled space. A church or a theatre incorporates the rest of the landscape rather than the reverse. Light passes in the form of a church, a theatre or any other building, but it is not retracted from the building during a closer and more rational observation of the item – light becomes form because it is connected with something that is evoked at first and then described. This development means the basic liquid nature of pictorial work, in which the project and refinement of forms depend on the searching idea.

FRAGMENT AND  UNITY

Timeless Rome – Roesler and Galli matched

The shift between memory and memoir overshadows that major relationship between the fruit of processing imagination in terms of past rediscovered and detailed information about a past that someone is up to analize for us and with which we enter in close confrontation,emotionally forging that blend between memory’s Utopia and sensation along memory.

Fragment brought into unity solves that gap caused by time’s discrepancy,but discrepancy is, unconsciously,searched by mind to gather forces and reconstruct hypothetically a world…within its fragments – giving us the idea of a growing image created by some transcending force inside imagination,capable to make the flavour of shadows and lighted zones of space represented enlighten in us the sense of those shadows shifting into the lights and moving fantastic mechanics inside the event of listening to the sound of image.

E. Roesler Franz depicted a few panoramas of Rome during the 1880s – “Fishermen’s buckets by Ripa Grande” extends the concept of liquid space relating it to the other space of the sky through colour nuances – Rome seems to be dissolving in the distance – the main point of the painting seems to be an evoking of something that may be existed in a way .

“Palazzo Altoviti” in its gradually descending geometry is not reflected on waters – it occupies an urban area that almost resembles the one of a Middle East town – masses are clustered and the vivid orange  shadowed at the bottom encloses a chromatic process of fusion between environment and building – matter gets old and vanishes.

“Porto di Ripetta” (1888) stimulates to consider the entrance or staying of the two-mast ship in the harbour as a consequence of the interchange between space imagined and proportion in her delaying across colour,which is one of space’s vicars – in the indefinite dawny sunset of the sky a corpuscolar light forms sections of mixed energy – the building and the stairs on the right with their untold silence contain the harbour sense of expectation and “stasis”.

“Middle Age remains on Isola Tiberina” reverses the idea of migration of Past into Present – Past shouldn’t exist; Present englobes the crossing elaboration of the same status of things – the ruins emerge from water as if they were built out there to be observed overtime.

“The broken bridge” (1880) allows a leaking of afternoon light to follow the tide and it literally paints on the river a sort of diagonal surface that transforms the buildings of the right bank into something disconnected from the things represented in the left portion of this fascinating painting – time is divided into two parts – it appears a longing for close passages from tangible illumination to drafted experience of the shadow and of sensivitized antiquity.

Giuseppe Galli’s oil on canvas “Luce-vita in  Vaticano” (Light-Life in Vatican) considers form starting from an objective point of view,analizing her power through an imaginary turning of sight – a change,a slight change in view’s perspective – forms given by light tend to dark but are not dissolved – they exist as form visible…for ever – because mind’s light overshadows the solitude of time,of its evening-to-become intercourse with those forms themselves. – this perfect and characterized painting  flows from bottom to top attributing to fragmrent a unity that belongs to the subject and seeks universal in her own self..

Roesler tries to let colour shift across the canvas’ plane – Galli entraps colour in a detailed form,trusting the unconscious energy of shadows as bringer of subtly light-like intuition.

Paolo Scaramella Proietti

The Painting of Giuseppe Galli

Houses and buildings, streets and squares, were more or less presents in the painting’s history; after the machine’s invasion ( and we actually are for this, the victims besides the witness ) the “stage” became fuller. We could remember for example some paintings of the great Mario Sironi although on the contrary of today his squares were silent. Later the realism’s art came, and also the excavators in the building-site, scooters etc. These are the subjects that Galli prefers and observes frequently with attention, putting them in the middle of his painting because the painting in his works become poetic-yeast that it brighten-up and dominate.                                                                                       

                                                                                                                                  Enzo Fabiani

The colour's harmony and the shape's balance

City, cars, people, colours, warmth, noises, are a disturbing mixture of things that rolling-up with an implacable way the Giuseppe Galli’s life and painting. The painter’s ability inventive is surprising because he expresses an high meaning at his work putting in harmony  two apparently dissociated elements: chaos and order. In the first Galli expresses with the thick colour an explosive and concrete sense of the matter; in the second he tries with the drawing to order the shapes through a masterly relation between curves lines and straights lines permitting at the colour to rise inside harmonious spaces. The compositions are good and the “kairòs” (that means right proportion from the greek language) is always present in the painter’s intention. The colour’s harmony and the shape’s balance are together the main characteristic of the very expressive Galli’s painting.

Sandro Trotti