ArtNoble Gallery is pleased to present History only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar coated, a project that brings together the work of Giulia Mangoni and Luca Staccioli. At first glance, one immediately perceives the strong connection that both artists have with the natural world: each in their own way absorbing and transforming the landscape, which vibrates before the viewer’s eye, welcoming them into a world filled with magical connotations.

Through bright colours and the playful, carnivalesque aspects, both practices, allow for profound questions about contemporaneity to emerge from their works.

In the construction of her paintings, Mangoni takes images scattered from an array of geographies and roots them in the territory of the Ciociaria region in Italy. The juxtaposition of familiar and foreign imagery triggers a play between real and imaginary landscapes, which brings with it a careful reflection on the way each of us inhabits space, shaping it according to our needs. In a subtle way, the artist mocks the expectation of the authentic that one very often has when standing in front of an ideal rural landscape, emphasising the difference between image and presence.

Staccioli, in an open dialogue with the theme of metamorphosis and regeneration, uses the snail of the supermarket deli counter’s queue eliminator kit and transforms it from an everyday object characterized by mechanical features into the matrix of a living body, which takes the form of a natural organism inspired by the prickly pear. The artist suggests the possibility of reviving the poetic sense in everyday things, despite the violent cynicism that increasingly permeates our reality, by re-imagining parts of the landscape where a combination of the mechanical and the organic emerges, emphasising new ecological dimensions and the continuous transformation of the landscape.

In both cases, the artistic research finds its strength in the combination of a blatant propensity for levity, playing with the superimposition of colours and the transformation of images, and a solid awareness of the need to open up to questions, at times distressing, about the world around us. History only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar coated is an act of trust, urging us not to look at things hidden behind a veil of carelessness and ‘sugar-coated’ inattention, but to take them in their fullness, composed of light and shadow.

Ilaria Baia Curioni