curated by Edoardo Di Mauro

Thursday 23rd May 2002, Velan will present a solo exhibition by Theo GALLINO (Poirino, TO, 1957). During the Nineties, the artist took on his research mixing painting and photography, striving towards the painterly expression of everyday, inexpressive materials such as the condom and the pluriball. The series of condoms photographed on canvas and retouched by pastel dating back 1994  became a mark to create abstract compositions but kept in the same time intact their metaphoric character. The latest works, the Pittografie (Pictographic), are characterized by another protective element: the pluriball, the polythene with air bubbles used to protect fragile objects in packages. On the background of the thick grid of the pluriball the forms are printed on photographic paper and mounted on large frames, with different thicknesses to create asymmetries and shadows effects. In a process echoing Man Ray’s rayographs, Gallino combines figurative and abstraction, monochrome and tonal variation, technology and lyric poetry. Although the artists prefers the two-dimensional expression, he will present also an installation with which he explores a contamination with the object: on stylized little tables, it is reproduced the iconography of the polythene bubbles accompanied by the phrase “but I want to live”.  Theo Gallino attended studies as advertisement designer. He dedicated himself to painting but also to graphic art passing in particular from the chalcography to screen printing and lithography, creating works in his atelier in Pessione (TO).  Constant element and, at the same time, main theme of his expressive research are, and have been from the beginning, the matters connected to the notion of protection and the pluriball has become the symbolic element of it, following a precise and meditated transformation during the years. In the last decade he used the bubbles polyethylene (pluiriball) exploiting its many potentialities; starting from the first photosensitive canvases, continuing with the use of the material itself and arriving then to the pictography, the pluriball has always been the physical element apt to filter and at the same time protect and mediate subjects belonging to the most different everyday situations.