Let's talk about art...
THE WALL.
In December 2017, the MarmoTour brought international street art inside the Ravaccione Marble Gallery from which the prized marble is extracted: the world-famous "white marble of Carrara," and with which man has grappled for millennia since the dawn of Western civilization. Inevitable is the comparison with the great artists of the past, especially with Michelangelo who drew, or rather "liberated," the material for his masterpieces from these valleys and mountains!
In the locality of i Fantiscritti, inside the Apuan Alps, hides at the end of the long tunnel carved into the rock the Ravaccione Gallery quarry, a lunar and evocative place in the midst of mining activity and a center of great tourist attraction: in this natural cathedral majestic in size and grandeur is host on its own 160-square-meter area to the new work by Ozmo, a Tuscan artist originally from Lari who has now become one of the most internationally known Italian street artists whose public works can be found in significant places on all continents and who boasts exhibitions in prestigious museum venues (such as the Museo del Novecento in Milan and MACRO).
An innovative initiative that testifies to the topicality and expressive potential of Michelangelo's example and the marble he used; an expressive short-circuit that combines within the quarry painting and sculpture, innovation and tradition, the younger and more disruptive expressive languages of contemporary art and the more classical material and historical dimension.
THE ARTIST.
OZMO (Gionata Gesi), born in Pontedera in 1975, trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and in 2001 moved to Milan, where he participated as a protagonist in the innovative ideas and rupturing currents of his generation, laying the foundations together with a group of friends of what would become Italian street art; of these years remains as an emblem the Leoncavallo, where he painted part of what Sgarbi called the “Sistine Chapel of modernity”; however, he loves to return to Tuscany and has already paid homage to his city with “the portrait of PI” and the iconographic “portrait of Galileo Galilei.” His figurative visual research is expressed variously (with graffiti, installations, canvases,…) and is imaginative; he draws from tradition with a “renaissance” sensibility and makes frequent reference to sources and quotations that he “remixes” with imagination in a personal and contemporary key, often elevating them to symbols and encyclopedic references: “imagination is the invisible glue that binds everything. The X elements, for which I draw from tradition not necessarily art, are things that pre-exist independently of my drawings, which I encounter in everyday life and then also in artistic practice. At the base, however, there is a fascination with images, it is something I have suffered since childhood and it is the attitude that moves everything. For a few years I also stopped drawing in my head, in the sense that the fact that I could draw not only from my imagination but also from external images was something that gave me a lot of cues and allowed me to act in a fairly neutral way … kind of like the figures I was copying were ready-made. And then there was also the aspect of theft, that is, of indirectly appropriating first of all urban spaces and then also the sources, taking back famous paintings….”
His public works can be found in significant locations on every continent (from Miami to Shanghai), and prestigious museum venues that have hosted his many exhibitions include the Museo del Novecento in Milan and MACRO, for which he created a permanent work.
The Creation of Adam, depicted by the great artist of the Renaissance in the vault of the Sistine Chapel commissioned by Pope Julius II is the iconography that at Ozmo has been asked to reproduce; “genesis” that in the belly of the Mount Torrione takes on a special significance: here the Apuane give us the gift of the famous Carrara marble , one of the most beautiful and fascinating materials offered to the world by Mother Nature, with which generations of artists have dealt since Roman times, reaching the heights of artistic creation. Inside the quarry, the parallelism between divine and human creation, between nature and art, is sealed by the scene of the Genesis in which God precisely creates man in his own image and likeness; in this the artist has a privileged position in the Universe in that no one better than he, the genius builder of beauty, can intuit something of the pathos with which God, at the dawn of creation, looked upon the work of his hands: here lies the dialogue between Ozmo and Michelangelo.
The explicit will of Francesca Dell’Amico, was to pay homage to the city and its citizens with this mural that could be admired free of charge on the opening day and during the two special opening days held on December 22-23-30, 2017.
