Massimo Giannoni

After “Arte Italiana” at Palazzo Reale of Milan (2007) and the Venice Biennale (2011) curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, “Four Triptychs” at Palazzo delle Esposizioni of Rome (2012) and “Linee di confine” at the Museum Bilotti of Rome (2015), today Giannoni is for the first time in Singapore as the leading character of a great monographic exhibition curated by Sergio Risaliti. The artist presents 27 large oil paintings, expressly realized for Partners & Mucciaccia Art Gallery. These paintings are characterized by pasty and profound colors with a dense and substantial pictorial matter that enhances the color expressive power and seems that literally devours the subject figurative textile making it nearly unrecognizable. With his painting, Giannoni gives shape to sensations and materializes his beloved places: the ceiling frescoes of the ancient Libraries, the views of Florence or Singapore, the crowded places of stock exchanges and of the Specola (Museum of Natural History of Florence). These are places where the artist draws inspiration from the past, he classifies it and he reinterprets it from a contemporary point of view, starting a new complex mechanism of nested structures where worlds return to other endless worlds. These are places where forces, impulses and conflicting sketchiness act like in order and disorder, figurative and unclear visibility, expressing desires of conservation and abandonment; sometimes desolate, sometimes full of persons, however it gathers in itself unlimited possibilities where the passage of time is at a still. The title of the exhibition, “Panopticon”, refers to the idea of the observation of the space around one’s own body, where the Ego is at the center of the world and the artist exercises his optical, mental and sentimental domain. Therefore Giannoni’s paintings reveal themselves to be “Cabinets of curiosities” that turn into metaphors of other place, apparently desolate, with bookshelves that hold all the knowledge of time or of exchanges that seem to accelerate or fragment it.--Gallery website.