BRIDGING N.1

Gallerie Riunite is pleased to host the exhibition project BRIDGING, featuring selected works by Gianni Dessì, Andrea Fogli, and Ugo Giletta, curated by art historian and critic Lorand Hegyi.

The very title suggests a desire to overcome geographical boundaries in order to trace a common aesthetic root. This is not simply a collective exhibition, but a dialogue between three individual paths investigating the same condition of humanity in today’s sociocultural context.

The project continues the intent of the Aragno Humanities Forum to create immediate connections between Italian and Central European artists, fostering an intense and continuous exchange of aesthetic visions, cultural historical concepts, and artistic experiences among the protagonists in various cultural centers and artistic communities. The “BRIDGING” series of exhibitions offers, on one hand, collective showcases that focus on specific themes reflected by the participating artists, who come from different countries and cultural contexts. The works of the Italian artists presented in this exhibition reveal a deep-rootedness in various cultural discourses and historical-artistic contexts, seemingly linked both to a revisitation of the academic traditions of the late Renaissance and Mannerism, and to the culture of Romanticism and modern philosophical issues, especially Existentialism and anthropological reflections.

Gianni Dessì and Andrea Fogli live and work in Rome, where they received their academic training and continued their aesthetic and philosophical studies. Ugo Giletta lives and works in Piedmont and is more strongly influenced by Nietzsche's thought and 20th-century Italian literature, with an interest directed towards existential questions and metaphysical perspectives. All three artists employ different media to express their discourse on the existential state of the artist as a micro-sociocultural institution. Their deep interest in literature and philosophy can also be explained by their overall aesthetic vision, which encompasses artistic activity as part of the broader cultural context, closely related to philosophical, anthropological, sociological, and historical reflections.

**BIO**

**Gianni Dessì**

Born in Rome in 1955. Numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad during the 1980s and 1990s generated and increased critical interest in Gianni Dessì's work, including participations in the Venice Biennale in 1984, 1986, and 1993. His training also linked to avant-garde theater and the use of combining different expressive languages has given his work a completely original character. Since the beginning, his paintings do not appear confined within the boundaries of the canvas, but expand beyond it, onto the walls that host them, emphasizing the intention to expand towards an "other" space, beyond canonical limits. Emblematic in this sense are the impressive wall interventions created in 1994 for the Italian Institute of Culture in Paris and in 1996 for one of the walls of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome on the occasion of the XII National Quadrennial Exhibition of Art. From the material pastes emerge archaic and primal images. These include ellipses, diamonds, symbols of infinity, eyes and spirals, cracks and hemispheres that populate an esoteric and estranging landscape. The metallic elements, either knotted in the center or applied in the form of large plates, as well as the volumes that sometimes protrude from the canvases, create tension with the frontal aspect of the work, forcing the viewer to make continuous shifts to sense the extreme complexity of the forms they observe. The significant exhibition set up at MACRO in Rome between February and March of 2006 documents the further evolution of his language, open to using new materials like fiberglass resin, focused on the creation of singular perspective games in modified settings for this purpose, and directed in recent years towards plastic research that, contrary to his pictorial commitment, is linked to figuration.

**Andrea Fogli**

Born in Rome in 1959, where he lives and works. In 1983 he graduated in philosophy from the University La Sapienza in Rome and two years later, in 1985, presented his first solo exhibition at Ugo Ferranti in Rome; from that moment on, he began to exhibit in Italy and abroad, articulating his work through a wide range of expressive means: painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, video, performance, and finally writing. The poetics that Fogli creates can be traced back to Symbolism, and drawing, which the artist tends to substitute for oil painting, along with pastel and tempera, represent privileged modes that play a key role in his art. These are indeed techniques that allow for the easier achievement of blurred, vague, indistinct images, unreal, enveloping, and strongly evocative atmospheres, in which forms can evolve into other forms, revealing unexpected meanings. The simultaneous presence of poetry and drawing is not rare. Sculpture also has considerable importance in Andrea Fogli's creative work because it allows him to realize in volume the ambiguity of image evoked, emerging in the drawings. His most significant iconographic themes range from animals to landscapes to nudes. The principle of metamorphosis unites both drawings and sculptures and constitutes the driving force behind his subtle poetics, aimed at bringing the inner world outward. From 2006 to 2008, Fogli was invited to teach at the International Summeracademy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, the prestigious Free Academy founded by Oskar Kokoschka after World War II, where some of the most renowned international artists have taught, including Italians Manzù, Vedova, Paolini, Merz, and Chia. His works are included in the collections of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, the MART in Trento and Rovereto, the MACRO in Rome, the MARTA in Herford (Germany), the Ursula Blickle Stiftung in Kraichtal (Germany), and the Galleria Civica in Modena.

**Ugo Giletta**

Born in San Firmino di Revello in 1957. He works almost exclusively with the human face. Although these enigmatic forms are motionless and almost devoid of will in the empty, indefinite space, or perhaps more accurately, they have been placed there, they suggest a certain timelessness and real indifference, yet they still maintain an inner tension, a hidden, incredible latent energy that they seem to be able to control. Like in an eternal state of waiting, they occupy a non-place, in an indefinite void, even though at any moment a transformation could occur, or a dramatic, essential change of status, a radical overturning of one's being and history.

It is exactly this disturbing ambivalence that makes these figures so suggestive and interesting; precisely this latent potential for a true story makes them significant for us: they carry a message, hold fundamental meaning for the observer, and suggest their capacity to communicate something essential to us, despite their indifferent, motionless reality, despite their impenetrable silence. This enigmatic, real, suggestive silence carries something ancient, archaic, savage, something that recalls great shared experiences.