Nuova Galleria Morone presents Alfabeto Blanco, an exhibition by Giovanni Blanco (Ragusa, 1980) curated by Gabriele Salvaterra.
Dark joys for a Blanco archive. When one remains locked up in the most asphyxiated physical and mental spaces, where air does not circulate at all, it becomes vital to cling on to something, to start again with the most basic and even stupid actions in order to find a foothold thanks to which one can climb out of the well. One turns to one’s own personal archive, to a private Atlas , to the collection of images that through randomness, carelessness and laziness are accumulated and set aside for years on banal photocopied media. We are in front of the practice of repetition, of looking at reality in a mediated manner, a strategy that is now characteristic of a certain contemporary painting that finds it more authentic to describe the world through its simulacra than by looking it straight in the eye (and after all, involving simulacra in this vision is nothing other than a way of looking into the eye in a more complete manner). We are confronted with a reiteration, the fulfilment of a self-imposed cycle that has to do with the meditation of prayer: a psalmody with no practicality that only reaches its meaning at the end of the path in the closing of the ritual circle. In the case of Giovanni Blanco, such duplicated actions cannot fail to involve a mastery and virtuous confidence that makes these archival pieces as precious as oil humour jewellery with a chronological feel (but what chronicle? What topicality?). But one cannot help but notice that, perhaps for the first time, the seriality of a claustrophobic project has also lowered the expressive heat, cooled the explicitly autobiographical temperature, benefiting from it, achieving a mysterious generality out of a condition that, on the contrary, was all about closure within oneself. From the navel to the cosmos.

Giovanni Blanco was born in Ragusa in 1980. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna with Massimo Pulini.
His expressive research is studded with a poetic imagery conceived in narrative cycles, where every single image is thought of as a fragment of a wider, ‘plural’ discourse, thus experiencing painting as a means and never as an end.
”For me, the painting is an open device, a bearer of trespassing and memories, in order to organise thoughts that are able to return this multi-directional gaze of mine.”
He currently lives and works in Modica (RG).