Fausto Gilberti. Disegni tra le scapole: SOLO SHOW MILAN

Wizard Gallery is pleased to present the new solo exhibition of Fausto Gilberti entitled "drawings between the shoulder blades", from 18 January to 23 February 2023 at the space in Corso di Porta Ticinese 87 in Milan.

 

The exhibition is accompanied by a text by Roberto Dulio:

 

 It all started with the nun: an ink drawing on a sheet of paper measuring 25 by 40 centimeters made during the descriptive geometry class. 562 characters occupy the sheet in an orderly fashion: a taxonomy of human, physical and social typologies. Above, in the center, all black, the first character to be drawn: the nun who gives the drawing its title. On the horizon Andrea Pazienza, but the expressive lines with which the bodies, faces and clothing of the characters are traced are already personal, distinctive. When the professor approaches the very young (17 years old) Fausto Gilberti and discovers him, intent on completing his debut work, he does not reproach him. He compliments. So the drawing works! It's 1988.

 

Now the characters that pile up on Gilberti's large drawings are a little less; they are no longer closed in rigorous ranks and all belong to the same category: they are artists. Yet there is clearly a karst link that unites not only the first and last work, but all the intermediate ones.

The distinctive features of the little men would not be so precise if they had not been refined through a subtractive and additive process regulated by a mechanism of periodic alternation, catalysed by the different techniques used (Indian ink, pencil, oil paint, tempera, acrylics).

 

The compositions would not be so refined if Fausto Gilberti hadn't built a bridge between Bad Painting and the old masters along the way. The crowds of artists would not be so free if they hadn't been preceded by crowds more disorganized than those of the nun, then distilled into the recognizable individuality of rock artists: Rockstars, his first book, was published by Corraini in 2011. Above all, we would not have all these artists if at a certain point Fausto Gilberti hadn't decided – placing himself between Vasari and Bruno Munari – to tell us about their lives. And thus came out: Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Yayoi Kusama, Lucio Fontana, Jackson Pollock, Louise Bourgeois, Banksy, again for Corraini, between 2014 and 2022.

 

And finally, the current exhibition at Federico Luger's Wizard gallery would not have settled in so well if it hadn't been for the previous exhibition Lost Control (from the song She's lost control by Joy Division, from 1979) held in the spaces of via Circo in 2012, with crumpled drawings that invaded the gallery and those smoothed out in the frames. Today we observe these large drawings (from one meter up), in ink on paper, simply attached to the walls. We find again the protagonists of Gilberti's books but this time all together, mixed but recognizable, for the features, skilfully synthesized, and for their fetish works. You look at them and fantasize according to free associations evoked by the chorus of the protagonists. Observing, recognizing, perhaps not all the protagonists of the drawing, questioning oneself and looking again thinking of the known stories and those only intuited, suggested by these great crowds (which take us back to Bruegel and, in an apparently less bloody way, to Bosch).

 

After looking at them we look at them again, so the drawings work: like The Nun. They cause us that indefinable sensation until Vladimir Nabokov (Literature Lessons, 1980) grasped that «although one reads with the mind, the seat of artistic pleasure is between the shoulder blades; it's that little shiver we feel back there»: the drawings between Fausto Gilberti's shoulder blades.

 

Roberto Dulio.

 

Fausto Gilberti is a painter, draftsman and author. He studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and began exhibiting his works at the end of the nineties.
Winner of the "Acacia Award makes you fly 2004" and the "Cairo Award 2007", he has about a hundred solo and group exhibitions to his credit, both in Italy and abroad. In recent years he has published numerous illustrated books, almost all published by Corraini and translated abroad into many languages.
Among the most recent Banksy (2020) and Louise Bourgeois (2022)
He lives and works in Brescia.

 

Per italiano vedere il press release