Riccardo Gusmaroli Biography
Riccardo Gusmaroli was born in Verona in 1963, lives and works in Milan. His photography studies and his long-lasting experience with Studio Azzurro led him to found Studio Acqua in 1984, consolidating his activity as an architectural and still life photographer. This early path, which will influence his artistic production, and the multifaceted imagination in executing small compositions using objects and materials found in drawers, will be random elements that will bring him closer to the world of contemporary art. It will be thanks to the intuition of the gallerist Franco Toselli that he will begin to exhibit, participating in the "Imprevisto" exhibition organized by Luciano Pistoi, dedicated to the most promising young people, inaugurated at the Castello di Volpaia, in Radda in Chianti, in the province of Siena in 1991. Thus in 1991 Gusmaroli suddenly and unexpectedly found himself projected onto an important stage, giving rise to a conspicuous artistic production; the freedom with which he ranges in the choice of materials and surfaces he uses is surprising, but not casual: in an infinite journey he travels and revisits objects of our everyday life, from stamps to scores, geographical maps and photographs, holy cards and dice game. His line explodes in chromatic signs with irony and elegant lightness, offering a fantastic vision of reality; Galleria Sperone in New York and Studio Raffaelli in Trento hosted him in '93 and '94 for two group exhibitions. 2000 inaugurated a fertile exhibition season, with solo exhibitions at the Galleria Tega in Milan, the Galleria Forni in Bologna, the Studio Simonis in Paris, but also in public spaces such as Viafarini in Milan with Accardi and De Maria. Meanwhile, Gusmaroli continues with great freedom in his creative research, creating textures of great formal elegance and light poetry. The boats are a minimal operation that requires the strength to "go and remove" and which characterizes the research of the last decade. They are the vortices of white-on-white boats that propose imaginary journeys, the result of associations, sensations and connections that arise from the materials themselves. A calculated musicality, told by the waves of paper folded into the shape of objects linked to the theme of travel, unfolds in his works with a lightness of light and shadow, fullness and emptiness, action and non-action. But not just vortices of boats: spirals of tablets that draw persuasive arabesques, nautical charts with seas rippled by a multitude of origami, everted holes that hypothesize new volcanic morphologies and then eggs embroidered with fretwork, in the manner of old lace, naval battles, chandeliers of crystal with drops painted by a thousand pictorial flashes, holes on paper and thermal blankets and photos folded like carpets of stars.
