"Sur 24"
 
This exhibition is dedicated to the war in Ukraine that began in 2014 and now continues with the large-scale invasion by the russian federation, which took place on February 24, 2022.
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The exhibition presents in the eighteenth-century spaces of the former Cavallerizza of Palazzo Sant'Elia, a series of paintings, sculptures, and a pictorial painting and object installation. All the works, except in one case, were created after February 24 of 2022 y.; in the new, alienating, and surreal (hence the abbreviation SUR in the title) condition of exile because of the war. The Residence location is Palazzo Sant'Elia, a splendid example of late Sicilian Baroque architecture. The works on display, therefore, live on the aesthetic suggestions offered by the magnificence of the Palace, with its decorative and iconographic motifs typical of Baroque culture, becoming a powerful metaphor for a process of death and rebirth, in line with its history. In collaboration with: Direzione Edilizia, Pubblica Istruzione, and Beni Culturali della Città Metropolitana di Palermo

Curatore Giusi Diana

A more prosaic object bursts into the exhibition, directly from the chronicle of the war. It is a "Molotov cocktail", an incendiary device that, in this case, has as its trigger the flag with the colors of Ukraine. It is perhaps the most mediatic symbol of the resistance of the Ukrainian people, a weapon that civilians have learned to prepare and use to defend themselves from the invader. To this object, a small painted landscape is approached, it is a sunset on one of the famous beaches of Odesa, "Otrada" which means “joy”. The work is in the words of the artist: “[...] the symbol of the life of civilians forced to fight to survive, instead of rejoicing, loving and creating.”

After “Molotov cocktail”, another crude reference to the war, this time, in particular, referring to the life of the Ukrainian military forces in the trenches, is the painting depicting a belt loaded with ammunition for a machine gun. Shapes with a syncopated visual rhythm that metaphorically refer to the noise of the burst of bullets.

In the series of sculptures made of raw clay, the anatomical parts of a human skeleton in its mineral materiality - in particular a skull often present in sacred iconography - are juxtaposed with the soft shapes of a hand that belongs to a man, whose body was thrown into a mass grave: "[...] the bones take the form of a sacred attribute for me: a symbol of life and death, in a process of transition. Between birth and burial".

Rocaille is a delicate oil on paper, one of the first works created by the artist in Palermo; the homonymous decorative typology of natural inspiration, with motifs of marine concretions, typical of late Baroque and Rococo architecture, ideally brings the artist back to his city of origin, Odesa on the Black Sea: “The rocaille is an element of Baroque architecture that reflects in the form the spirit of my hometown, Odesa. Saline calcifications, sea shells [...] are, for me, symbolically, the image of home”.

The presence of immobile animal bodies in the rigor of death, returns in this oil on paper, a monochrome with darker and purplish tones, it is the post-mortem portrait of a horse, testifying to the fact that the same organic destiny unites both men and animals. The original function of the place of the exhibition, which was born as a stable for horses, paradoxically brings to mind the life of the ancient inhabitants of the Cavallerizza.

The vulnerability of organic matter, in the bare evidence of the flesh exposed to the eye, with the bones that draw an plot, usually invisible, tightens, in the artist's vision, unprecedented formal alliances: “The structure of the human body, the city with its urban lattice, or an object like a belt with the ammunition of a machine gun: all this responds for me to the same formal principle: rhythm and functionality [...]”. This is especially evident in the diptych, depicting a monochrome double still life.

The painting entitled Mila, is the portrait of a musician friend, a young woman crouching with a melancholy look, caught in a moment of everyday life. An image that comes directly from another life ago before.