“You will learn the hard way that in the long journey of life you will meet many masks and few faces.”
Luigi Pirandello
(from the novel “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand”)
The main subject of the works presented is the relationship between reality and fiction.
It is a subject that I have developed over the years due to two main factors: having worked for years as a free-lance illustrator of children and young adults literature (a profession that has led me to develop a language aimed at illustrating a world, and related characters, most of the time fantastic), and a real fascination for black and white photographs of the first half of the 20th century.
Initially I reproduced, with oil paintings, some black and white photographs belonging to my family members, deepening a work on memory and on the sense of belonging to a family, a history and a specific culture. This new path also coincided with my return to Italy after ten years of living in Scotland.
But together with the nostalgic content towards an Italy of the past, and towards my culture of origin, in this path there is also the need to move away from the creative practice that characterized the years of my work as an illustrator, during which the constant effort was to create fantastic but at the same time credible imaginaries, respecting the narrative suggestions of the text to be illustrated.
I later felt that these realistic works lacked a fantastic component, which instead had characterized my ten years of work as an illustrator. I therefore gradually moved away from my family’s photographic repertoire to search for black and white photographs that still had a “surreal” or fantastic component, such as photos of children dressed up for Carnival or Halloween. I am fascinated by the fact that these images look like pictures taken from a fantasy world, but in reality they are photographs of real moments.
So it is as if I were following an inverse path to that I was doing as an illustrator, that is, where before I created fantastic situations with the aim of making them credible and coherent with a totally imaginary world, now I return images that, although coming from reality, are difficult for the viewer to be credible and compatible with our real world.
Another element common to many of the exhibited artworks is the attention to the mask, intended both as a playful and desecrating artifice of reality in a traditional festival context (Carnival, Halloween etc.) as much as in the Pirandello sense, that means as an automatic defense mechanism, or rather as a protection that as individuals we adopt in relating to the other, sometimes consciously, but more frequently in an unconscious and spontaneous way.
On a social level, in recent years this mechanism has been further strengthened due to preventive measures aimed at stemming the spread of the Covid19 virus. Social distancing and the use of masks have become part of our daily behavior, conditioning our way of relating to “the other”.
Germano Ovani
Categories
Location details
St. Margaret’s House – Galleries 1, 2 and 3St Margaret's House, 151 London Road
Edinburgh EH7 6AE