Omar Galliani - New Saints, New Flowers

Portraiture is one of the most widespread artistic expressions, especially in painting, but also in sculpture, throughout the ages. Portraiture is, first and foremost, a description of the subject depicted, an attempt to convey their physiognomy and individual characteristics truthfully and naturally. With the progressive evolution of artistic research, the physiognomic description of the subject has also been accompanied by a psychological one. Therefore, over the centuries, portraiture has also become a means of introspective investigation of the subject, their character, and their state of mind. The processes of abstraction brought about by contemporary art have contributed to this type of investigation. Most of Omar Galliani's pictorial production focuses precisely on the portrait genre. In this artist's research, profound influences from antiquity combine with an original and extraordinary contemporary sensibility.

In Omar Galliani's portraiture, his love and passion for the Italian pictorial tradition are transfigured into visionary representations of great aesthetic impact. Galliani draws on the formal perfection of Renaissance art while also employing traditional techniques such as graphite and charcoal. He thus creates evocative portraits with strong contrasts of light and shadow, achieved through a flawless sfumato technique. However, the artist completely recontextualizes this structure of extraordinary harmony and naturalistic mimesis. He "dirties," so to speak, these perfect faces with his textural and gestural interventions. Thus, the portraits almost disintegrate, their pictorial application blending with the randomness of the canvas textures and the wood grain of the panels. The artist then intervenes in various ways, adding a refined and mysterious symbolism, made up of calligraphic pictorial gestures, which imbues his figures with a sacred and mysterious aura.

Artist Omar Galliani was born in Montecchio Emilia in 1945. He trained at the Academy of Bologna and teaches painting at the Brera Academy. In 1982, he joined the Magico Primario movement and in 1984 the Anachronism movement, which brought him closer to a conception of artistic practice in which the Italian figurative tradition merges with the contemporary. He participated in several editions of the Venice Biennale and the Biennials of Paris and São Paulo. In 1995, he was invited to the exhibition Tutte le strade portare a Roma at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. He exhibited at the XXII Rome Quadriennale, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi. In 1996, his work Ballerina was acquired by the Chamber of Deputies.

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