29 November | Certosa di Maggiano
OPENING Friday 29 November 2024, 4,00 p.m.
30 November 2024 – 30 March 2025
“Kairos”, personal exibition of Filippo Galgani in collaboration with the Certosa di Maggiano.
Violetti Arte Contemporanea is delighted to present the personal exhibition of Filippo Galgani “Kairos”, in collaboration with the Certosa di Maggiano. Twelve sculptures in marble, bronze and geomalt will be exhibited in the spaces of the 14th century monastery from 29 November 2024 to 30 March 2025.
Poetic fragments, relics of Praxitelean beauty, traces of a lost past which is reinterpreted with modern sensibility: the aesthetics of the fragment permeates Galgani’s art. In a continuous dialogue between the ancient and the contemporary, the artist gives life to bodies of pure beauty. Classic in their rigorous configuration, charged with Hellenistic influence, Galgani’s works captures the moment of emotional tension.
Kairos is the personification and idealisation of the opportune time or the right moment, of the instant which borders on eternity. “History is the object of a construction whose place is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now”, as Walter Benjamin wrote in one of his theses. Here lies the substantial difference between Kronos and Kairos. The event, the unrepeatable opportunity, the opening of the possibility, time of a qualitative nature, accompanies the linear, monotonous time of the clock.
Galgani embodies this moment in sculpture in an archetypal form and writes a poem which restores dignity to history. Galgani’s art captures the essential and unveils the Kairos. It extracts from linear time that which is worthy of being remembered, which is not in relation to time but to eternity, or rather, that which throughout time is eternally worthy of being.
The research carried out by the artist on the human form is based on the study of harmonious proportional relationships. The figures are born from naturalism but are brought back to ideal forms, thus achieving an idealised naturalism. The central element is the pursuit of absolute beauty as a symbol of spiritual perfection. His work does not aspire to a correspondence to reality but, thanks to the constant inspiration it derives from the ancient world, it can be a valid means by which the soul of the observer can be elevated to the highest spiritual values.
Galgani’s distinctive signature is his constant reference to the classical world, where mythological figures, such as Nausicaa, Antinous, Proserpina, are revisited and redefined through a study between the artefact and the archetype. His works are never presented intact or perfectly concluded but are always fragmented, broken, with omitted or eliminated parts. This leads us to reflect on the concept of unfinished, not as a Michelangelesque ideal but as the opportunity to imagine beyond, leaving the artwork free to expand and evolve.
Galgani, nostalgic for a paradise lost, for an ideal of ancient splendour as a perfect balance between harmony and measure, pursues perfect beauty, incorruptible over time, thus immortal.
His representation of the human form testifies to a desire for spiritual perfection. Galgani speaks of the myth and sculpts history, invoking the concept of humanity: an ethical value comparable to philanthropy but to be understood also as Paideia, a spiritual and material process, an ethical and moral development of man towards the highest virtues.
The osmotic binomial between the architecture of the historic Certosa di Maggiano and Galgani’s works is crucial. Two realities which merge, establishing a dialectical relationship. The Certosa was founded in 1316 following the wishes of Cardinal Riccardo Petroni as a place of hospitality and refuge, and the model has been embraced and maintained throughout the centuries.
Galgani’s artworks live in time but are a manifestation of Kairos; they are the moment which, in its perfection, invites us to meditate on the crisis of modern man’s certainties. «Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti, / ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo» (This alone we can tell you today, / what we are not, what we do not want”), Montale, Ossi di Seppia. The only truth is the awareness of the impossibility of possessing certainty, of an indecipherable and unknowable world, in which art remains the only true way towards knowledge and elevation. Galgani, a modern aiodos, a contemporary prophet of ancient memory, with knowledge of what was, what is and what will be, tells individual stories which become paradigms of universal values.
