Art Brussels 2025

For Art Brussels, ArtNoble Gallery presents Rainbowmagicland, a new and unpublished series by Italo-Brazilian artist Giulia Mangoni (1991).

Rainbowmagicland is a transitional, hermetic space — a murky zone of transformation — where one of Mangoni’s research-based projects of the last few years finds its natural end, leaving a fruitful painterly environment that brings forth a more personal journey of familiar representation.

Our story begins with the theatrical legacy of Marga Sergardi, also known as “the baroness who directed the farmers’ theatre” in her family’s piccolo teatro at Palazzo Sergardi Biringucci in 1930s Siena. Charged with the peculiar vitality of a creative spirit navigating life under a fascist regime, Sergardi creates a collection of fictional figurines that become archetypes of mischief and idealized rurality in a moment of historic violence. In honour of the 2023 exhibition Verzura, presented at the Palazzo in collaboration with C.G. Williams Gallery, Mangoni worked from the theatre’s archive, translating and resurrecting Sergardi’s original characters through the use of paintings, sculptures, and set design. Staging a quiet rebellion, Mangoni imagined these personaggi (characters) slipping away from the dark corridors behind the Palazzo’s theatre where they had been stored and displayed, through the long rooms and down a flight of stairs in a motion towards the garden, the final destination before their escape into the Sienese landscape.

Rainbowmagicland deals with the next chapter of our story, where Sergardi’s characters have travelled southwards through Italy and are now scattered, lost, and perhaps a little disorientated too. Borrowing its title from an amusement park located near the Valmontone shopping center, halfway between Rome and Naples, along the road to the artist’s studio, Mangoni imagines Sergardi’s figurines approaching Rainbowmagicland with hopes of finding bucolic delight and finally gaining distance from their sticky origins. Unfortunately, the landscape is imbued with a melancholic tension; beneath the surface of playful imagery, a shadowy disquiet lingers. There is no escaping the past, and as the figures approach Mangoni’s studio, they dissolve further and further into the landscape, until the paesaggio of the painting itself destroys the narrative. The ground eats the figure, and the idealized rurality that once gave birth to these fantasies ends up devouring them whole.

Our story ends and begins again with Mangoni’s familiar and recurring sense of a landscape that is not passive, that refuses to be travelled in serenely, and that questions its own use as backdrop for a specific character or story. In an act of cannibalism towards the original narrative, the throbbing landscape brings forth five new paintings, this time closer to Mangoni’s own autobiography. Two artists live in a chicken coop, a matriarch gets reabsorbed into a new tree, a brother appears mysteriously, a cousin achieves an honourable merit. What has remained from Sergardi’s translated figurines is only the desire to create one’s own archetypal structures — to find forms that inhabit the painterly landscape amidst the ambiguity and unease that signify our times.