On the 2nd – 3rd – 4th – 5th December we are closed for set-up
“Christmas, my child, is love in action. Every time we love, every time we give, it’s Christmas.”
(Dale Evans)
December is the month during which the streets fill up with decorations, the squares are teeming of markets and windows of the houses sparkle in the rhythmic alternation of lights that adorn Christmas trees. December is the month of the most popular festival: Christmas!
Even the Galleria360 gives its personal welcome to the Christmas season, organizing an artistic event entitled “Xmas-how”, with the participation of foreigners artists known in the international scene. Although the laws of the capitalist market are profoundly changing the Christmas’ nature, are stripping it of its mystical and symbolic meaning, the magic of Christmas always brings us back to a lovely atmosphere, in a ritual dimension. A rite, able to diffuse light, in the time of year in which the shadows are longer; a rite that every year, while we prepare the nativity scene and the Christmas tree, leads us to retrace the streets of memory, to perform the same gestures that we have learned since childhood. In fact, Christmas is one of the most popular celebrations, rich of traditions, charms and folklore: Santa Claus and Christmas tree, the Magi and the cave with the Bambin Jesus, the Christmas meal and the exchange of gifts. But Christmas is not just a moment of joy, serenity; it also an occasion for self-indulgence, meditation and reflection.
In a fourteenth-century fresco linked to the theme of the Nativity of Jesus, executed by Giotto for the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Mary is lying on a rocky slope covered by a wooden structure, and has just borne Jesus, laying him down, already bandaged, in the manger; she is helped by a servant, in front of which the ox and the donkey appear. Joseph is squatting down with an expression that is enchanted and dreamy. In the Nativity of the Artist, the Christmas mystery focuses and expresses itself with the intrigue of gestures and glances in the sweet maternal embrace, transforming the fairy tale into a true, splendid and touching story.
Even the artists of the contemporary exhibition “Xmas-how”, through artworks that do not try avant-garde adventures but always combine the object with emotion with extreme simplicity and purity of mind, woven implied dialogues that speak us subtly of that rite, of the mystery of Christmas; the mystery of that rebirth that is renewed every year and that is none other than the metaphor of the rediscovery of our deeper interior life and spirituality.