Roberto Floreani / Alchemica

The aim of this one-man show dedicated to Roberto Floreani is to highlight the work of one of Italy’s leading abstract artists and at the same time inaugurate a new chapter in the exhibition annals of MAGA dedicated to abstract art at the very time when conceptual and figurative are in violent contention and a senseless battle is raging between the primary and secondary markets, militant and traditional critique, avant- and rear-gardism.
After the great exhibitions on two leading maestros of the twentieth Century figurative art (Modigliani and Giacometti) and in the wake of the important event on the collection of notary Consolandi on the conceptual declinations of what constitutes art in general, it seemed appropriate insofar as possible in a single exhibition to document the research into abstract art with all the complexities and diversities its historical trajectory has witnessed, how it has survived decades of revision and contamination to become a significant core part
of our collection.
It is true that Floreani’s pictorial work tends more to the American rather than the European school of abstract art, embodying synthetic thinking, constructive reasoning and chromatic texturing.
The works cover the whole pictorial odyssey that stemmed from it – a progressive and intense pathway of creativity combining material, colour and shape that would subsequently be superimposed. The outcome is a layered and decanted accumulation of memory of phases
of construction that can be seen in transparency, or viewed in formal cross-section which become to all effects a naturalistic, stylistic key. The narration is concluded by the mark, whether concentric or chromatic but always meditated and drawn by deduction from his own matrix and applied in accordance with serial logic, organisation and repetition.
Each painting phase points the survey towards stretching the potential of the same elements; each work takes disposition and reflection back to the same point of departure to then follow a method based on thought and rituality, and suited to the patience and measured gestures
of oriental disciplines, but not too distant from what inspires the great tradition of western painting.
Alchemica, a title emblematic for a well-defined methodology and not some wayward ideology linked to the ancient esoteric science,
is coherent with the empirical understanding of that process, called opus alchemicum which by means of the exact succession of processes of transformation and co-penetration of certain elements sought the exact formula of immortality. The very immortality that great artists, poets, writers and painters have always strived towards in a wave of transcendence which is well represented here.