Press release – Gianluca Marinelli: Bazarov (curated by Andrea Fiore)

November 22th – December 31st 2017

Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday 2 pm - 7 pm

Galleria Monopoli is pleased to present Bazarov, a personal exhibition by Gianluca Marinelli (Taranto, 1983) curated by Andrea Fiore. The exhibition project is inspired by the protagonist of the novel 'Fathers and Children (1862)' by Ivan Sergeevič Turgenev (1818-1883) and reflects on the vicissitudes of contemporary society. Evgeny Bazarov is a young nihilist who does not believe in anything and has only confidence in sciences. The awareness of his role in a social system he would like to demolish and his high intellectual skills associated with cynicism push him away from the same people who, at the same time, admire and despise him. Evgeny dies of typhus fever, not fighting the disease but accepting it once he got it, facing its epilogue with dramatic clarity. "Death is an old story, "says Bazarov," but it is new for everyone." The character is the paradigm of every unexpressed potential. This is the starting point for Marinelli's artistic project. The works that define the exhibition path - paintings, photographs and videos - are expressed through a modulation of contrasts and idiosyncrasies, between energy and failure, radicalism and dispersion. The heterogeneity of the materials and narrative registers are associated with free incursions in other historical events, with the awareness that they have clear tangencies with our days. The idea of unexpressed potential seems to unite Bazarov to his 'heirs', exhausted and overwhelmed by the inevitable precariousness. A reflection fracture carried by the video concrete mixer a mechanical and disturbing entity that in his impetuous soliloquy remixes ambitions and inhumanity, existentialism, sentimental archeology and literature. In the paintings series the images appear instead as constructivist wastes, rethought and object of pathetic evocation. In Bazarov the poetry of fragments and blurred resonances binds to the search for one's own identity, not forgetting that "Without the sense of your own dignity [...] there can not be a solid foundation for social welfare, "as Turgenev writes. "At the center there is the game of life and the inevitable destiny of man facing time: habits, disguises, mistakes, inadequacy, "says Marinelli, and the drama of a story that is repeated, that of Bazarov, which, after all, is the story of each one of us.