Red Elation Gallery is delighted to present the project “it. figures”. The exhibition compares three names of Italian contemporary art around the theme of the recovery of classical representation in the most recent current art research. The exhibition presents a selection of recent works by Franco Anzelmo, Giuseppe Biguzzi and Silvio Porzionato, each chosen for their ability to combine individual and social issues of contemporary man with the Italian figurative and aesthetic traditions. The exhibition path, consisting of sculptures by Anzelmo and paintings by Biguzzi and Porzionato, summarizes one of the most pressing needs of the art system: the restoration of the contact between the art of today and its history.

The exhibition curator, Carolina Lio, writes in the catalog: The contemporary art of recent decades has pursued experimentation. The acceleration of this system, as well as all other social and economic schemes of our time, has turned the necessary intellectual action by the avant-garde in a run-up without control to novelty and provocation. What mostly suffered in this situation was the continuity bonds with the history of art, often deliberately broken in a sort of rejection by many contemporary artists who have long perpetrated against a conception of the aesthetics of art. But the new global crises, first of all the economic one, places up front of the need for content and their redefinition. Where should one start if not from the history of art as a reference point? It becomes clear how important it is to connect the contemporary to the past in a meaningful way of meaning that evolves but does not disown itself.

Great museums and galleries, and hence in the big fairs, painting and sculpture designed in the classic sense, after having been considered obsolete for years, have gradually come out again to confirm the need for a cultured connection with history and for a traceability of an aesthetic path within the experiences of art. At the same time, so that the work of art has a meaning, it must be inserted in a contemporary context that, in this time facing a critical vision of itself, often results in a lack of context, requiring a reinvention.

It is no coincidence that paintings by both Giuseppe Biguzzi and Silvio Porzionato are decontextualized portraits, respectively on a neutral and minimal backgrounds, in which the human being is alone at the testing ground of a new relationship with himself. In the case of Biguzzi we find ourselves faced with anxious and disappointed young women, alienated, that deny the gaze and shut themselves away in an indefinitely and melancholic wait. Whereas subjects by Porzionato show a boldness in contrast with their loneliness and their helpless nakedness, giving the idea of characters struggling with an inner strength. Both artists are trying to open their subjects to a fresh look on the world and on themselves. Equally in the sculptures by Franco Anzelmo, new men, like an Adam of a second generation lost in time, discover a life pure and uncluttered, an archetype of innocence, cleansed and free, moving lightly to reach and to challenge gravity and other heavy laws of the world.