Meghiddo

Peter Donaldson, Franklin Evans, Panayiotis Michael, Federico Solmi 

According to the time of political, economic, cultural transformations disturbing our society, the title of the exhibition “Meghiddo” originates ironically from the name of the valley in Palestine where, according to the Jewish-Christian tradition, the final battle between the good and the evil will take place. "Meghiddo" wants to evoke and to exorcize at the same time: the manicheian temptation that cyclically presents itself to the doors of the human mind; the multi-universe produced by short-circuit of people, cultures and ideologies that feature our times; the eschatological characteristic and the salvation potentiality of the art, considering it - in a turned over idealist perspective that would have made Hegel horrify – like a peak of development process that still has in the philosophy and in the religion defective forms of the soul expression. 

Panayiotis Michael presents a site-specific installation, similar to that one realized for the Cyprus pavilion at the last Biennal exhibition in Venice. The drawing becomes the medium of election for expressing the overlapping of changes of universes and the different speeds that characterize them. Fascinated for a long time from the processes of changes and from the interaction between the common good and the natural vocation of people to the liberty and the happiness, Michael, by his monumental installations, combines collage, sketch and mural painting, introducing the theme of a reality that is beyond what is verifiable and that is able to provide us the necessary tools to face the situations of conflict with renewed energy, considering not one but thousands of possible futures.

In this way the art makes free his potential savior and, particularly the sketch discovers him, through his designer’s soul, not more as simple precursor using other media, how much rather as the most appropriate language to express the necessity of opening to a fertile imaginative ground.  

Federico Solmi has been called to introduce some great unpublished poster drawn by his last animation King Kong And The End Of The World. The Gorilla represents the advent of a “messia”, animal and brutal, but fundamentally good, decided to sweep away a world whose pretensions of civilization meet him with the injustices, the loneliness and the egoism from it daily fed. In this version of the history King Kong starts picking above all up him with the great institutions of the art such as the Guggenheim and the Gagosian Gallery in New York. However, the story has a happy ending between the book of the Genesis and the previous job of the artist on the pornostar Rocco Siffredi. 

Composed from more than thousand sketches realized by hand - with the help of the expert of graphics 3D Russell Lowe - the animation is accompanied by a great poster that perfectly translates on the paper, through a neurotic and incisive line, the aggressiveness of the great monkey, protagonist of the video. 

The forms, wanted graceless, of the sketches of the animation and of the poster of Solmi, aren’t made by a formed contour of only one line, but from complexes of lines that grow thick in an outline, that is perfectly harmonized with the music chosen by the artist’s wife, Jennifer, and with the awkward going of Kong.   

Also the title of the video of Peter Donaldson, Scottish artist working in Tokyo for several years, plays threateningly the apocalyptical trilogy “The Fall Of Babylon”, which narrates King Nabucodonosor II's hybris metaphorically transformed by God into a wild animal with the punishment of the madness for seven years to have erected a gold idol with his own image. 

Donaldson by few tools and an aesthetics "low-fi", but drawing to the wealth of the myths of East and West, to the pop culture of the video musical and of the souls Japanese years '80, show as is not quite necessary to invest great budget and to deny the culture of mass to confer to his own video the status of "work of art." 

The video has been accompanied by some poster made in digital and by the preview of a new series of jobs by pen, charcoal and watercolors on paper, with the title Warriors of the Wasteland. 

The watercolors of Franklin Evans use the fluidity of the expressive mean for representing the unstable nature of the contemporary world, its changeable tension, making to flourish worlds on worlds through a dense and luxuriant color. The tables of Evans delineate a un-cosmic space provided by a plurality of centers and made by a development of biomorphous elements between the abstract and the figurative one, by psychedelic horizons drawn by a marker against which the contours of human figures, escaped to the composition, define rarely. They are jobs whose labyrinthine taste seems to betray a vocation neosurrealista and neomanierista, in reality you must be framed in a dimension "pre-figurative" for their attempt to represent the prender-form of a reality that he doesn't reside in the unconscious, but more precisely in that "not-still-aware", that the philosopher utopian Ernst Bloch identified with the human ability to anticipate and to express through the art the last destiny of the man and the world. 

Luca Vona