Solo exhibition - Giulia Mangoni
With a text by Chiara Guidi
25th September - 15th October, 2023
ArtNoble gallery in collaboration with Lunetta11 are pleased to present at Casa Gramsci (Turin) Pomeriggio Anfibio, Giulia Mangoni's solo exhibition with a text by Chiara Guidi.
From the swamps of the great social disintegration in southern Italy after unification, characters from the Ciociarian folklore emerge, displaced in a borderland landscape between Rome and Naples, where the backdrop slowly tries to dissolve them.
The work presented for Casa Gramsci stems from an interest in territorial representation through the production of a Soran ceramist, Roberto Tersigni, who solidifies stories like that of the Bourbon soldier; waiting for orders from a regime that has already fallen.
A man left alone, in uniform, finds himself uncomfortable in the new state of affairs, vainly trying to control the river that surrounds him, wanting to put his hands in his pockets but not finding them, slowly forgetting what he was supposed to do. This and other characters like San Giorgio from Broccostella are born in ceramic form and are transferred to canvas through oil painting. They represent a displacement 'from the South' in the face of a unification that truly leaves them lost and fragmented.
They thus become symbols of a territory that still today feels uneasy about an idea of united and modern identity in relation to its own landscape and in relation to the neighboring major centers. Full of contradictions, a provincial place, bucolic, industrial, decentralized, service-oriented, labor-oriented, transitional, a Ciociaria with ambiguous boundaries, Mangoni gives life to this series of paintings that, in the hot, humid atmosphere of its waterfalls, presents us with the characters of the Soran ceramist through a South American magical realist lens.