By Michela Centioni
For all of those who have always longed for contemporary artworks at reasonable prices, the appointment was at Battersea Park from 15th to 18th March 2007, for the “spring collection” of The Affordable Art Fair.
This fair aims at making contemporary art accessible to all and stimulating the visitors’ curiosity and interest with regards to the multiform and eclectic contemporary art scene, still difficult to define and focus.
The Affordable Art Fair gathered about 125 art galleries from all over the UK, exhibiting a wide range of photographic, pictorial and sculptural works, in a welcoming and coloured space, where the visitors were free to explore, observe, and ask information to the very kind staff of the different galleries and, why not, even buy a unique piece to give their own houses a touch of originality for less than £3,000.
Getting into the long aisles of the fair, among the names of artists coming from all over the world, we have found the works of some interesting Italian artists.
In the space of the Cynthia Corbett Gallery the photos by Marco Bolognesi stood out, joining a surrealistic taste to a clear glamour tendency: his three exhibited works are part of the Woodland project, commissioned in 2002 by the Italian Cultural Institute, and completed in 2006 with a book edited by Bomar. Bolognesi challenges the fashion's aesthetic canons through the experimentation and the contamination of styles, and his art recalls some surrealistic fantasies by Delvaux or Oppenheim. The artist's images make use of the fundamental elements of the fashion world by changing their meanings: the models’ bodies lose their perfection in being joined to extraneous objects, such as zippers closing their eyes, piercing grafted in the flesh and flowers shutting their mouths. These extraneousnesses coalesce into the feminine figures, transforming the subjects into hybrid and metamorphic beings, illuminated by direct light and impressed on glossy paper.
Completely different is the work by another of the gallery’s artist, Yvonne de Rosa, who portraits subjects in black and white, hidden and confused by means of a melancholic use of blur. In her photos we recognise an extremely deep artistic sensitivity, not directed to the purely descriptive fact but aimed at the creation of evocative and poetic images. The artist underlines a specific element in each exhibited work, such as the Mona Lisa painting or a Christ image, making all of the other elements functional in drawing the attention to it.
By continuing our research through the galleries of The Affordable Art Fair we lingered in front of the FarmiloFiumano's stand. The gallery housed different Italian works by artists such as Giovanni Prassi, representative of the Neapolitan school of Magic Realism, whose works are mainly inspired by Italian landscapes of ports, following a classical and academic imprint. Gianni Allegra, a Sicilian artist currently working as an illustrator for the Italian newspaper la Repubblica, has caught our interest: his two works Cronaca and Picciotto are achieved by the use of strong colours, net and forceful brushstrokes, clearly detaching themselves from the style of precedents works, taking as inspiration the comics style.
At the Zebra Gallery, the last one we have visited, the gallery staff talked to us about the numerous painters of the Bel Paese they decided to promote; among these Alessandro Nocentini, inspired for his works by the Florentine landscapes in which he was born and raised, who creates his engravings using watercolours, realising works of large pathos, beauty and vitality.
Another artist present at the exhibition was Oliviero Masi, etcher and craftsman, who reveals in his nudes and landscapes the harmonic beauty of reality and nature. Masi follows and looks after his etchings during the whole creation process, engraving manually and printing them in his personal atelier.
An interesting personality, finally, is Gianfranco Asveri, very close to the expressionism of Art Brut, whose painting comes from the observation of reality and materialise on canvas with instinctive gesture, rich with colour and life.
Came to the end of our extremely delightful immersion into the multifarious worlds of contemporary art, we joyously benefited from the comfortable catering that The Affordable Art Fair offered. While sipping a coffee, eagerly reading the brochure, we discovered that we would have had the chance to become little artists as well: during the exhibition, in fact, in collaboration with Artichoke Print Workshop, the fair organised workshops of different techniques such as etching and engraving, free and suitable for all ages.
See you at the next edition then, to discover the infinite creations that contemporary art will keep for us, reflecting and transforming with the power of imagination the reality surrounding us, and its inexhaustible and continuous mutation.
The video of the fair is available on our website www.giorgiostudio.co.uk.
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