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Institut Valencia d’Art Modern Opens Gianluigi Colin. Mitografias

The Institut Valencia d’Art Modern (IVAM) presents Gianluigi Colin. Mitografías an exhibition on view 23 November 2011 – 22 January 2012.

With this exhibition proposal of the work of Gianluigi Colin, which comprises 26 drawings divided into four groups, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Mercury, and a large installation, The Wall, made up of 300 oil paintings on canvas, the IVAM addresses an analysis of the role of myths in today’s society.

The themes chosen by Colin are taken from everyday life and reflect the realities of a time in which the trivial has become the main object of interest. Colin interprets myths not as aesthetic forms but as elements immersed in a social, cultural or historic ensemble, possessing a sense, a meaning or a representative value of this reality, as we can see in the exhibition.

A catalogue has been published for the show containing the works displayed and texts by Vincenzo Trione, Gianluigi Colin, Humberto Galimberti, Arturo Pérez Reverte and Consuelo Císcar.

Gianluigi Colin bases his Mitografías (Mythographies) on a question: what have Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Venus become for us? His answer does not consist in taking a walk down nostalgia road. He attempts to track down distant survivals. He scrutinises the often overlooked outbreaks of classicism scattered in the cracks of our present. He uses the myth as a privileged instrument, not for abandoning “this” world but for running through it in a different way, by going down untrodden paths. When he hears “talking oracles”, he composes postmodern frescoes where he breaks away from centrality. Committed to go beyond the usual rules of the tale, he lingers on happily found details.

To endow his impressive “tableaux” with life, Colin resorts to a complex technique. In the first place, he browses through newspapers; then he chooses pages where he finds “revealing” images; then he crumples these pages in a gesture of moral intolerance; next he photographs these wrinkled sheets of paper; afterwards he prints the file on newspaper paper, which he sticks onto a layer made of fragments of newspaper cuttings (a kind of “rewriting” of the classical printing technique); finally, he intervenes impetuously with his hands on this material, forming new creases. – www.ivam.es

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