STILL NOTHING

On Tuesday January 12th, opens the fifth exhibition of the series proposed by ABC-ARTE, in partnership with MARYLING and cured by Ivan Quaroni. STILL NOTHING, solo exhibition by APT artist Giulio Zanet,

As many others, Giulio Zanet started to paint following the figurative tradition, even if, since the beginning, he was intolerant towards narrative structures to focus on a deconstructive concept of representation. his first aniconic works inevitably came from the artist’s awareness that there was inadequacy in figurative representations. This unsuitableness becomes evident when looking at the excess of images and visual narrations present in contemporary culture, from the new media to advertising.

The constant exposure to information and the extensive use of superficial storytelling (and meta-storytelling) must have induced Giulo Zanet to reject figurative representation to save the practice of painting. The practice of painting is considered by this artist as an uncertain and unstable tool to discover the inner and outer world. Giulo Zanet’s research acquires a relevant anthopological meaning. It is not only a cultural opposition to the invasion by mass-media, but also a persuasive alternative option to traditional storytelling.

In his research, the progressive transition from deconstructured representation to hybrid abstraction is driven by the desire to build a style to perform the vagueness and inaccuracy of existential experience.

The title of the exhibition, Still Nothing, looks like a acknowledgement of failure, a perpetual collapse, through which cognitive uncertainty is established as an existential value in a Socratic way. Zanet’s painting style, even when pattern and texture prevail and destroy any possible narration. In his paintings, images are fixed through plastic or flat structures, lines bundle up in Cartesian orders and vibrate like waves of energy through vivid diamonds. The artist is not attracted by the analytical precision of these uncertain shapes. Actually, his ambiguous geometries and irregular patterns symbolize an attempt to place order into chaos, where signs and gestures emerge from a jumble background, they contain this confused entropic bunch of vital experience.

Zanet does not work like Gerhard Richter, whose programmatic approach investigated the image created by the media together with the tautological forms af abstraction. Zanet has an experimental and unpredictable attitude, he looks into reality pushed by a honest presumption of failure and, at the same time, he is aware he will need to repeat his challenge every time.