Dorigatti, Moneghetti, Ragno | Quasieden

QUASIEDEN – Piermario Dorigatti, Adriano Moneghetti and Leo Ragno

Collective exhibitions in Milan

Finissage 29th October h 18-21
From 24th September to 5th November 2024
(from Tuesday to Saturday 14-19.30 other times by appointment)

HALL SHEET.

Curated by Claudia Ponzi
Critical texts by Antonella Mazza

Three authentic artists.
Three formations, three traditions and three schools of thought.
Three friends who teach at the same Academy: Brera.
QuasiEden is the common territory, where their different expressions, between engraving, drawing and painting, find a shared space, with deep esteem and mutual friendship.

P, 2023, 1/5
Graphia paper 300gr

Piermario Dorigatti was born in Trento in 1954 and studied at the Brera Academy, where he is a professor of Engraving Techniques.
Authoritative artist, in love with painting and engraving, feeds his ‘creative fury’ with a daily search.
His first training takes place with an ‘against sculptor’, Mauro De Carli, from the Trentino not very pleased towards the art system, who stated: “I strongly claim the role of the individual, of being an artist, who must regain autonomy by reappropriating the intellectual tools that make him unique and free, unbound from any ‘system’. To give back the role of ‘protagonists’ to authors, so that art will return to guide the spirits”. Words that may have been uttered by Piermario, a cultured and independent artist, genuine painter irremediably painter, free man. “For me to be a painter is like putting on a robe or a uniform: I feel that I must absolutely do it.
It is a faith for me to paint, it is an immense act of love.”
The memorable meeting with the CoBrA group at 13, thanks to an illustrated book found in his home, gives birth to the impulse to draw, which will never leave him again. His great imagination shows us a very wide cultural panorama, his painting comes from the German neo-expressionism, Georg Baselitz and the American abstract expressionism, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky.
His works are gestural, immediate, the drawing swallows space, his engravings are filled with layers of figures that melt into each other in free associations. His is a visceral passion, necessary, essential, that corrupts the form, questioning it until the end of the dream.
His non-language so personal makes biomorphic presences appear in continuous evolution. A super crowded Eden, a great Eve with her snake, figures that emerge almost indecipherable, pulsating, magnetic, ready to establish a dialogue with our deepest feelings.

Mela (apple), 2024 1/6
Dimentionscm50x35
Pescia paper 315g

Adriano Moneghetti was born in Milan in 1974, he studied at the Brera Academy, where he is a professor of Art Graphics.
His prints, made with the technique of polychrome xylography, give us the beauty of everyday life. Boxes of mandarins, fennel, cauliflowers, carrots, eggplants, an apple torso bitten by an AlmostEva. All made with a very personal trait, an indispensable language, an unmistakable stylistic figure full of naturalness, rigor and irony. It’s a post pop herbarium. His energetic engravings remind us of the abstract wood engravings by the American Roy Lichtenstein in the early ’80s: “Apple and Lemon ( from Seven Apple Woodcuts)”. Adriano acts with the same force, his engravings maintain a strong expressive energy that comes from the pop art mixed with Otto Dix and Morandi. Recently he works in polychrome prints mainly obtained from wire wood matrices, that is with blocks obtained by carving the wood along the veins, and also with veneer and linoleum, the favorite of Picasso. Its aesthetic intentionality focuses on a few defined subjects, deepens their rhythm, contours, to make them become solemn archetypes of our daily life. It is necessary “Let yourself be moved by the banalities,” says Adriano. Because there is something magical in every object, it’s up to the artist to find it and make it emerge through the work and the complicated techniques of engraving.
“The goal is that everything looks fresh and spontaneous, simple. And simplicity is quite difficult. The important thing is to never take yourself too seriously.”

A lonely body, 2021
Oil on canvas
cm45x35

Leo Ragno was born in Milan in 1984, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Foggia, and taught Engraving Techniques and Art Graphics at the Brera Academy.
His studies of the human figure are representations of memory, elaborations of memories. Its purple pink in all its shades is the emotional color that gives the warmth appropriate to the intimacy of memory.
“With pink I created my world” says Leo.
The beautiful portraits of children recall the sensual faces of Paul P. Canadian visual artist, born in 1977 in Toronto, who transposes into his dreamy contemporary painting John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
In addition, Leo, in representing his nudes from the delicate eros, thinks of the dreamlike, visionary fantasies of Odilon Redon, the liquid painting of Eugène Carrière, the unfinished sculptures of Medardo Rosso, to the crude and solitary images of Francis Bacon and especially to the carnality of Lucian Freud, which ennobles with the delicacy of his stroke.
His figures are painted and then erased, in a process of continuous destruction and construction: “I remove and add, continuously” confides us.
The result is a rarefied, silent, evanescent, faded, blurred, very poetic painting, AlmostEden (QuasiEden).
With his grace Leo gives us delicate moments, slow episodes, that invite us to recognize and understand ourselves better.