GART is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Liminality involving artworks of Elay Li and Andrea Marchesini, two artists distinguished by their own linguistic autonomy, dialoguing in the exhibition due to the similar attitude translated and expressed in painting.
The concept of ‘Liminality‘- derived from the Latin limen-minis ‘threshold’ – is understood in psychology and physiology as a fact or phenomenon that is at the threshold level of consciousness and perception. In anthropology, Liminality, coincides with the quality of ambiguity or the feeling of disorientation that occurs in an intermediate, transitional phase, where one is ‘on the threshold’.
The exhibition presents two important and big artworks by Andrea Marchesini belonging to a cycle of paintings realised between 2015 and 2018, a chromatically explosive period in which the first hints of materiality, an element that today differentiates and makes the artist’s painting recognisable, were born. The two artworks in the exhibition mark Andrea Marchesini’s precious historical transition from the non-material to the material, as well as from total abstraction to surfacing figuration. Andrea Marchesini uses strong colour substrates that give his works a chromatic muscularity. He explores materiality, the sublime and, searching for a systematic structure with gestural spontaneity, he reflects on the artworks his own remaining expressive dimension on the borderline between being spontaneous and being conscious.
Elay Li views monochrome painting as his main artistic destination, with which he manages to keep figuration on the border of the invisible and perception. The monochrome, a distinctive feature of his artworks, creates an energetic intensity of impact that transforms into physical sensation; it can oscillate between disorientation and extreme self-awareness. Elay paints bodies and subjects immersed in existential situations that are unknown or taken out of context, scenes and characters that retain the profound power to influence the imagination of the observer. The apparent flatness of his figures proves oxymoronic. The solemnity of the subjects, absorbed in performing common actions – like having a drink for example – leads them to a temporal dimension that gives them a certain sacredness: they seem to define themselves as contemporary iconographies. Elay Li is presented in the exhibition with three artworks painted in 2021, one of which is unseen, one exhibited at the Florence Biennale and one selected for the PRS Talent Prize in Turin in 2021.
