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Giacomo Modolo, Blaze, 2022 | Crag Gallery Torino
Giacomo Modolo, Blaze, 2022 | Crag Gallery Torino. Snakesucks!, 2022, mixed media on cotton, 150×100 cm

The exhibition arises from a new pictorial cycle by the young artist, partly created in Turin, after a long period of reflection on his pictorial practice and a crescendo of inner and aesthetic research, a purifying ritual.

How are you today?
Well, after ten years of wandering down and out I opened up my studio in my house, in Vicenza. I get up and paint.. coffee and the kitchen are always handy, as it is my record player. I hope I don’t get too lazy.

Giacomo Modolo
Sacrifice, 2022, mixed media on cotton, 180×160 cm |

What’s your background?
My mother’s culture is music and I started creating images because of it. When I finished high school, I didn’t really know what contemporary art was. I just made (illustrated) posters for punk concerts, album covers, and different kinds of merchandise for bands‘ and friends‘ bookings. Underground circles and self-productions had been a major influence on my political thoughts and aesthetic choices. I come from a small but assertive town that has always stood up well for its alternative scene. Then, studying Decoration & Visual Art in Venice, different expressive needs from materials to motivations took over. Graphics gradually turned into paintings, still retaining certain overtly illustrative languages.

Where do you find inspiration?
Blaze is the latest series of paintings shown at Crag Gallery. They are the result of a quick, summer job: about a month and a half of isolation in Turin. I had just returned from a trip to Thailand where I had bought some of the raw fabric I wanted to use for the following works. Most of the newly painted forms arose precisely in relation to the cotton, which broadens and enhances the bright-toned, richly transparent paint. I, therefore, let myself be guided by a natural, abstract, and vertical flow of forms, arriving spontaneously at the recurring motif of the flames. I usually work with no planning at all. When I’m interested in something I develop it and include it in what isn’t its standard or real context. My influences are varied, seemingly contradictory, and constantly changing. In the last period, I have been keen on observing the European early medieval decorative tradition from which I take some formal (or animal) details, but at the same time, I have rediscovered a love for Depero’s plastic works and certain colors discovered in Thai painting culture. I think my curiosity for theatricality and two-dimensionality is guiding me in this sense.

What does your work aim to say?
It is like a ritual where images burn in flames and psychedelic fumes. Ferocious animals, coats of arms, relationships, and flags go up in flames along with everything that becomes a symbol of my daily certainties such as that feeling of belonging to something or someone. It is a purifying rite, where things are deformed and regenerated by mutating into something else, often into abstract forms that I don’t care to define… „destroying themselves in order to then rise again“! I try aesthetically to make the images very scenic, silhouetted, and sometimes ironic because of the simplicity of certain forms. This aspect allows me to downplay the themes, and make them more ambiguous.

Giacomo Modolo
Lovers, 2022, mixed media on cotton, 150×160 cm

Do you read books? What types of books?
I don’t have a favorite genre, I love Russian literature and I think Notes from the Underground was the book that absolutely marked me the most.. a turning point in my life. Lately, out of laziness, I have decided to read again books that I have in my library that might be a bit underrated. I highly recommend The Triumph of Metaphysics.

What are your impressions of ArtVerona 2022?
I have heartily seen a rich Italian panorama filled with talented painters. In this period, it seems to me that the shadow of the „schools“ has faded away and has been replaced by a varied and much freer language, focused on the international situation.

 Giacomo Modolo
Giacomo Modolo in his studio

Do you have another exhibition this year? What are you planning for next year?
I will devote myself exclusively to studying during the following months. Since my last solo show, I have been confronted by a number of exciting new things and I want to explore them all. I am laying the foundations for a new exhibition where I will try to combine different media and work on intense themes. At the same time, I am also working on an artist’s book. This is where I will enclose a series of monotype prints mixed with paintings and texts taken from pieces that have particularly inspired me along my artistic and human journey.

Exhibition: Giacomo Modolo. BLAZE

Giacomo Modolo – www.instagram.com/jack_modolo/

Bringing drawing into public space is one of Lavinia Lanner’s endeavours to make the viewers used to the analogue line again. Whereas cities are full of artificially produced visual stimuli.

In ‘Time Passes’, the middle section of Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse, the prose tracks through the Ramsay family’s vacated summer home. The island airs survey the house.

What binds the natural and the artificial worlds is a thin interwoven string of artistic exploration found in Susi Gelb’s exhibition LOOPZRING. Equipped with a fascination for scientific boundaries.

On the occasion of the Turin art week, CRAG Gallery presents BLAZE, a personal exhibition by the artist Giacomo Modolo. The exhibition was born from a new pictorial cycle of the young artist.

My name is Federico Vecchi I am an Italian painter and sculptor based in Vienna. I am making this crowdfunding because I was chosen to participate in the prestigious artist-in-residence project Via Farini.

Magnets, stitches, wires, and belts are holding together the artist’s installation. The jewelry she made, pearl earrings standing in pairs on a print framed and hung with the leather belt, textile flag, and earring.

Julia Valtanen, was born in 1988. Graduated with a Master’s degree in graphic design (2011). She has lived in Tallinn, Estonia since 2016. Completed painting course in EKA (Estonian Academy of Arts), 2019-2020.

Gert Resinger has been preoccupied with the word for a long time. Already in 2016, as part of his solo exhibition, he exhibited works under the title „RELAX“ that contravened the term.

Exhibition: How to disappear. The colours used in the works range from grey, beige, white, milk paint and eastern European green. Altogether, they manage to puzzle the viewer. So does the gallery showcase.

Laid out as a vertiginous landscape, Diego Perrone’s exhibition at MACRO brings together twenty years of the Italian artist’s multi-media output as well as five new works in the form of two work/displays.

If we preserved his style of giving titles in this exhibition, we would have called the talk „Meanwhile. 15th of October“ but we are not the artist; therefore, we entitle it „Panel Talk. Meanwhile“.

Lauren Nickou is an American artist and writer who relocated to Austria in 2019. Her recent work explores the range of how far she can push a single subject matter emotionally, stylistically and materially.

NV/Night Father/Vienna is an open-form performance brought to the stage by Paul McCarthy, one of America’s most controversial artists, together with the highly gifted German actress Lilith Stangeberg.