Crystallized Narratives - All Stories Will Become Images
"The main activity of us, as humans, is to constantly create narratives, in every possible form. All these narratives are made of the matter of time, the task of painting, and art in general, is to transpose them into space." – Nicola Verlato
With “Crystallized Narratives – All Stories Will Become Images” Nicola Verlato presents seven paintings and seven drawings that explore the stories humans and different cultures across the globe have told through thousands of years, and maybe more importantly, how these narratives continue to maintain their relevancy through time and inevitable shifts in culture.
The exhibition examines the idea of the painting as the ultimate example of a process aiming to transform cultural narratives and well-known stories into images. This is a process that almost every civilization has engaged in and continue to do so. Maybe this process of transformation is what qualifies a civilization as such? Essentially the whole process is about the passage between narrative located in time which, through the compression of data, slowly but surely moves toward an extremely dense image located in space. A process of progressive densification that transforms time into physical space. Through these processes the state of the well-known narratives changes from being dispersed in time to being present in our world.
The foundational idea of the exhibition relates to the many ancient myths that indicate the beginning of a civilization happening with a fratricide. This theme can be related to the very delicate moment we are living in right now where many groups in the United States reclaim a new or different idea about citizenship and belonging to a nation exactly because they were the victims of this fratricide at the beginning of the making of a new political organism.
The fratricide is depicted in multiple paintings in the exhibition. “Ritrovamento” is a painting about the assassination of the great Italian poet, writer, journalist, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922 – 1975). Pasolini was worried about the direction in which the culture of Italy was moving, which he was very vocal about and, in the end, murdered for. The composition of the painting is based on a painting by the legendary Italian artist Caravaggio (1571 – 1610), but the narrative has been substituted by a contemporary one.
Similarly, to “Ritrovamento”, “Mishima’s Seppuku” 1 and 2 depict the ritual suicide of the 20th century Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima (1925 – 1970). The seppuku was the brutal finale of a larger activist operation in 1970 in which Mishima and a small group of like-minded people protested the alleged decline of Japanese culture and the country’s abandonment of honorable traditions after the second world war. Mishima and Pasolini were similar in many ways, in that they both were part of a strenuous resistance against the process of eradication of their respective cultural heritage in Italy and Japan, which ultimately led to their demise. The suicidal hero who constitutes the archetypal figure for both Pasolini and Mishima is depicted by Nicola Verlato in his painting “Ajax”.
“I consider the transformation itself of linear narratives into painted images a form of cultural resistance against the implicit iconoclastic ideology of consumeristic culture.” – Nicola Verlato
Gallery Poulsen presents “Crystallized Narratives – All Stories Will Become Images”, a solo exhibition by Nicola Verlato.
Nicola Verlato Solo Exhibition “Crystallized Narratives – All Stories Will Become Images”
19.11.2021 - 18.12.2021
The exhibition includes seven oil paintings on linen and seven works on paper
Opening reception Friday, November 19th, 5 – 7 PM and Saturday, November 20th, 12 – 4 PM
Nicola Verlato will be present at the Friday opening
Contact the gallery at [email protected] or tel. + 45 33 33 93 96 for further information
Installation photos
