History Of The Humanity

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HISTORY OF THE HUMANITY

Anthony Coleman – Peter Frederiksen - Antonio Riello – Guadalupe Salgado

The history of humanity has been forged by “unusual characters”.
Condottieres and adventurers, guards and thieves, builders and saboteurs, dictators and guerrillas but there is no shortage of philosophers and self-styled healers, clowns and acrobats, scientists and artists ....
It is dotted with myths, beliefs and religions in which inexplicably, at every latitude, ancestral tales of floods, of great conquests, of insulting actions, of epochal battles between good and evil are handed down.
The history of humanity is rich in dichotomies where opposites clash, war leaving victims on the path.
They are the repeatedly repeated wrong actions that accumulate year after year, century after century, millennium after millennium. In the intimacy of a domestic hearth as in the primitive caves, between the Tigris and the Euphrates as well as between Tikal and Calakmul, with technological weapons as well as with an axe or arrow.

Four international artists touch on those central topics, unfortunately tragically back to date, using borderline aesthetics, sometimes disturbing and provocative, also due to the same irony or playfulness that is inherent in the materials and techniques they favorite.
They express themselves by mixing styles and techniques, drawing comics or pop icons with cotton thread or with crayons and pencils, sculpting wool like ceramic pits, decontextualizing objects or producing sarcastic ready-mades.

ANTHONY COLEMAN (1969, lives and works in Philadelphia, USA), self-taught artist, draws on paper with graphite and colored pencils exaggerated portraits of the "Strangers" mentioned above: public or television figures, clowns, singers or dancers are transfigured by hyperboles that become the distinctive feature of the artist, like the noses often more like beaks. The backgrounds, mostly monochrome, with bright colors increase the sublimation of reality. (these subjects are the -transfiguring- characters that fill the days of 'Tony Coleman')

PETER FREDERIKSEN (1987, lives and works in Chicago, USA) draws with a sewing machine, with colored cotton threads, scenes that could be taken from the cartoons of the golden years of the American comic. It portrays and make fun of the unhealthy attitudes, insecurities and baseness of the individual man as well as "community" life, often made up of oppression and unfulfilled promises.

ANTONIO RIELLO (1958, lives and works between Bassano del Grappa and London) eclectically stages the contradictions and paradoxes of Western society. In continuous anthropological research, it feeds on and returns reflections on the difficult human coexistence through sarcasm and irony. Ready-made compositions, sculpture, large pen designs dot just a small part of the artist's vast and varied exploration.

GUADALUPE SALGADO (1991, lives and works in Mexico City) through a varied and articulated textile art, shows an imaginary and iconography deriving from a collective baggage that shows us satire in  tragedy. It so happens that the work "Sacrificios" is composed with comic tracts of a large pink bow that could be that of Minnie overlooking a copious pile of bones. Of different workmanship is instead the iconic bison skull (impossible not to think of Georgia O'Keeffe paintings), sculpturally made of powder pink wool.
 

HISTORY OF THE HUMANITY

Anthony Coleman – Peter Frederiksen - Antonio Riello – Guadalupe Salgado

November 23, 2023 > January 13, 2024

The Flat - Massimo Carasi - via Paolo Frisi, 3 (MM Porta Venezia) - Milan -IT