“The most dangerous illusion is to believe that it exists only one reality.” (Paul Watzlawick)
Galleria360 is pleased to announce the opening of the new artistic exhibition entitled “Lost in Art”. The exhibition will be inaugurated on Friday 8th October 2021 at 7.30 pm at the new headquarters in via Borgo Ognissanti 77r, Florence. During the vernissage Jazz musicians will play live. According to the decree law of 23 July 2021, n. 105, from 6 August 2021, access to the gallery is allowed only to visitors in possession of the covid-19 green pass.
Ovid in the 10th book of the “Metamorphoses” tells us the story of Pygmalion, a sculptor from Cyprus. In the inability to find a girl worthy of his love and shocked in the face of the lasciviousness of the women of his island, or the Propetids who by prostituting themselves had outraged the goddess Venus, Pygmalion shuns marriage and decides to model a statue, which embodies his own ideal of woman. The artwork is so perfect that it looks like a real woman and makes him fall madly in love. Pygmalion decides to call the statue Galatea and fills it with attention; he is so subdued that he kisses her, hugs her and sleeps next to her every day, ardently wishing that the ivory transmutes into flesh. Aphrodite, taken for pity, decides to infuse life into the sculpture and Pygmalion finally sees the statue come alive and become a woman of flesh and blood.
Pygmalion’s myth is fascinating and complex because in just over fifty verses reflects on the meaning of love and the sublimating potential of art, capable of creating a better reality than the ordinary one. An art, therefore, that is no longer understood only as a mimesis, but as a new creation of an ideal.
Ovid through his myth shows us how artistic creation is endowed with a great power, that is to cheer us up, to lighten us, soothing the heaviness of life, as it stimulates our feeling. Aesthetic consolation, creating a sort of magical Apollonian illusion, prevents the tragic disorder of life from annihilating the individual: this is the cathartic function of art, which therefore does not explain the meaning of life and pain, but on the contrary gives them a sense.
“Lost in Art” is an artistic exhibition that teaches us to look beyond the materiality of our mere existence, to overcome the ordinary by showing us, through the thaumaturgical power of art, new horizons of meaning and hope.
Virginia Bazzechi Ganucci Cancellieri
