Come Creatura

RizzutoGallery is pleased to present Come Creatura, solo show of Francesco De Grandi (Palermo, 1968). The exhibition – part of Manifesta 12 Collateral Events, and included in the official program of Palermo Italian Capital of Culture 2018, under the patronage of the City of Palermo - sums up the research and reasoning on the Sacred Ideas that the artist has been developing in recent years.

Come Creatura takes the title and the start from a large painting that probes the primordial aspect of nature, familiar and terrible at the same time, as it must have been in the eyes of humans at the origins of time.

It starts from the narration written in the Holy Books and the legends handed down by peoples, that speak of how the world was created, of the first humans who inhabited it and of the Holy Plant, a tree that contains the knowledge of good and evil, the secret of immortality and damnation.

De Grandi's work tries to fix the moment when it all began, when two cold and tiny human beings looked up at the numinous majesty, marking that point of the evolution in which the Creatural feeling came up, with the awareness to be nothing but "dust and ashes", and in the dismay of that discovery the idea of God begins to manifest itself.

De Grandi faces up here a crucial point in his current artistic research, imagining the origin of the most profound and tormented condition of human beings: the relationship with God and the consequent birth of Religions. A reflection on that Creatural feeling that unites us and reminds us how all of us are equal in front of the great terror, trembling creatures who desperately try to give an answer to the revelation of a transcendent dimension to our existence. A burning question that since then until the present day continues to seduce, to console, to produce beauty, love and equality among humans, or to generate the hatred of intransigence, persecution and totalitarian power.

The exhibition unfolds like a story; among great paintings on canvas (including “The Triptych of the Stories of Jesus", made between 2015 and 2018), painted papers and site-specific drawings on the walls left to indicate the path, De Grandi tries to rewrite the archetypes of painting in the most visceral form.

The artist’s work allows viewers a slow assimilation of themes, forms and techniques, languages stratified in the visual memory and in the experience of pictorial epiphany, looking for the crucial moments of vision when the artwork, present and unequivocal, manifest itself.

In support of the exhibition will be presented an "artist publication", 48-pages book screen printed and bound by hand in one hundred signed and numbered copies, created in collaboration with Tomo Studio.