HERMANN BERGAMELLI
Valgua
25.03.2023 > 13.05.2023
Text by Felice Cimatti, Nel gesto stesso
A+B Gallery presents Valgua, Hermann Bergamelli’s second solo exhibition at A+B Gallery, Brescia. For the first time, the artist exhibits his new artworks: Sottrazioni, a series of seven pictorial works.
The philosopher Felice Cimatti has written an unpublished text for the show and restores the artist’s practice to the present day.
The name of the exhibition, Valgua, is taken from a crag in the province of Bergamo, where the artist experiences his relationship with nature through the sport of climbing, in which it is necessary to think about every action and to evaluate everything with calculation, intuition and method. The visual coincidence with the works, almost frottage of the rock walls, is not accidental in this new pictorial series.
Over the years, Bergamelli has diversified his work through the creation of three types of works, codifying them under three different names: Immersions, Compressions and Stratifications.
In the first series, the artist worked with fabric dyes, natural elements and stitching, while in Compressions the fabric became an integral part of the carpenter’s vice.
In the third series, Stratifications, Bergamelli pursued his research using several meters of fabric, first dyed, then torn into webbing and finally collaged into hundreds of seams.
From this series, he created a site-specific installation for Zazà Ramen’s spaces, titled L’ultimo pasto è una coppa di ramen.
Hermann Bergamelli’s research investigates and analyzes the use of fabric, that is processed and treated with actions of washing, tearing, coloristic and physical stress
The series realized for Valgua, named Sottrazioni (Substractions), allows us to see a new type of sperimentation, in which the artist challenges himself with the painting’s medium, through the use of pigment, oil color ad traditional additives, like linseed oil and turpentine. At this stage, this new method is translated into monochrome pictorial works, in continuity with the sensibility and formal solutions that often distinguish the artist’s works. The first step is the paste distribution on the canvas, that involves the use of hands and rolling pin, obtained from the combination of these two unstable elements by nature that the artist tries to discipline.
The force of these material choices emerges in the next phase of work, when the subtraction of pictorial material is physically modified with a palette knife, usually used in sculptural pratices.
The shades, outcome of the material exasperation, emerge from the relationship between the artist himself and the creative process.