@ Giovanni Bonelli Gallery, Milan

Fond of Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino? Impressed by car crashes or impressive movie scenes? … and by chance you are interested in art especially in the work of LA-based artist Nicola Verlato. So the place to be is the Giovanni Bonelli gallery in Milan on Thursday 23rd May at 6.30pm.
This is the unique chance to meet the artist to present his long-waited solo show in Italy.
The project stems from the film by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino and stresses the link to this particular painting technique with the popular mass culture. It also gives the show a precise length of time: the heart of the exhibition is the time that elapses between sunset and sunrise, as well as with the cinematographic work.
The exhibition settle the works into four distinct phases: a prologue, a dramatic finale, an interlude and a new beginning.
The Car Crash series depicts a glorious end, caught in the moment where everything is suspended and the meaning of things is stirred in a joyous awareness of panic. The sunset is sad but full of violence and resentment. The suspension from gravity allows the viewer to investigate in the depths of chaos, to discover the disturbing and unexpected beauty. This is, in a way, a three-dimensional still image, where figures and objects generate new possible compositions with no difference between nature and culture, organic and artificial, man and machine.
The nocturnal quiet of the middle part of the show, the heart of the exhibition, opens the door to many possibilities: sleep, sex, dreaming with demons, the reality outside the apartment, the video games space of awakens, a door opening, a huge glass wall and the frame itself where all of these dimensions are intertwined in the same space and the fragments of the end of the day settle in an intricate network of relationships.
Verlato’s meta-painting is able to include and develop countless spaces and multiple periods simultaneously. Reflections, considerations, ideas and visions lurk in canvases creating several situations, contexts, levels of interpretation.
Burzum makes reference to the famous Norwegian musician murderer and arsonist who burned Protestant churches’ cause, he said, built on the ruins of sacred places to Nordic paganism.
A Whiter Shade Of Pale is a sarcastic reference to the old song lyric of the band Procol Harum and encloses the entire biography of Michael Jackson: not just an indisputable musical icon, but a mythological universal character, impossible to be clearly labeled and categorized. Tragic, idiot and sublime, authentic and fake, the image of Michael Jackson is able to overcome all the commonly-conceived dichotomies providing access to more fertile ground of images.
Starting from a meticulous study of the human figure, from the mechanics of the movements, the physical body and its relation with the surrounding space the artist reworks and reasons upon contemporary mythology and iconography, result of this civilization.

The prologue introduces us to the irreconcilable contradictions that characterize the western horizon. The originating act triggers a cyclical movement of defeat and rebirth crystallized in the works now show. This act struggles between two opposite movements: the iconoclastic and alphabetic monotheistic tension and the polytheistic resistance of idolatrous images, represented in the show by the works Pan’s crucifixion or Conquest of the West.
FROM DUSK TILL DAWN
NICOLA VERLATO
24 maggio - 14 luglio 2013
Opening reception Thursday 23rd May – 6.30pm
GALLERIA GIOVANNI BONELLI
via Luigi Porro Lambertenghi 6, Milano
www.galleriagiovannibonelli.it
http://nicolaverlato.com/