(giuseppe Galli) Pope Biography
Pope (Giuseppe Galli) was born in Portogruaro in 1942. As a teenager he moved to Rome where he attended art high school. He follows Luigi Montanarini's lessons and frequents the Roman artistic environment. In 1961 he continued his studies at the Fano School of Art, interested in the lessons of the sculptor Mannucci with whom he established a solid friendship, and graduated in 1962. The following year, having moved to Venice, he followed Magnolato's lessons at Scuola Libera del Nudo and in 1964 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, attended Saetti's painting course, learning in particular the use of sand and earth, and graduated in 1968. The works of these formative years, initially attributable to the material-informal sphere, are gradually reducing the thickness of the pigment, partly replaced by inserts of newspaper pages, witnesses of his political and social commitment, but already balanced by spatial scores indicative of the search for a compositional order. In 1967 he participated, together with Mariano Fuga, Giuseppe Goia, Silvestro Lodi, in the study trip to Paris organized by the Academy of Venice and led by Carmelo Zotti, Saetti's assistant at the time, remaining impressed by the works of Malevic and Vasarely. Thus was born the cycle of Structures in which the investigation of perceptive problems takes place according to the gestalt modalities of Optical Art, as in Structures, 1971 in which the perception of movement is generated by the variation in the order of magnitude of the spatial scores and the relative right triangles generated by their bipartition. The results were presented in 1973 in Bergamo at the Arte multiplita exhibition at the 2B Art Gallery. Furthermore, the priority given to formal aspects leads to the use of different materials such as plexiglas in Natura in canno in which geometric shapes intersect and overlap in a chromatic play of pure colors and luminous transparencies, or chiaroscuro effects produced by the succession of empty and full spaces in nature in white. These works were exhibited at the personal exhibitions held in 1967 and 1968 at the Galleria Comunale Ai Molini in Portogruaro. The "Variable Paths" followed in the first half of the Seventies: the attention was focused on the pictorial specific in serial works, sometimes interspersed with monochrome panels, crossed by bichromatic stripes in alternating tones in which planning was the basis of a desire for objectification and extension to the environment. The Plurima art gallery became the reference point for his exhibition activity with its branches in Portogruaro, where he exhibited presented by B. Morucchio in 1972 and 1976, and in Udine, where he was present almost systematically from 1974 to 1991. In the 1980s, while Filiberto Menna theorizes the return to painting, he reviews his positions worried about exhausting his creativity in some sterile formalism. He then intervenes on the works by veiling the surface which becomes a memorial page of color and by rethinking the color he recovers it as energy in Dialogando and in the Chromatic Bodies, to which he associates a surface woven with dynamic thicknesses: ripples controlled by the systematic regularity of the gesture. In 1985 he exhibited with Ciussi from Udine at the Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art at the Molini di Portogruaro and he will return there in 2008 with an anthology which highlights the artist's operational coherence and thought on the specific pictorial which becomes language and therefore a form of communication. In 1986 he participated in the Arts of today exhibition in Budapest, and in 1987 in the Giornate della cultura italiana in Sumy (USSR), in the section The structure: constructive rationality, with Painting G2 and Painting R2, (yellow, black). In the 1990s he deepened a revision of the form according to Suprematist methods. That is, it returns to the bands that had already been protagonists in the Variable Structures, more peremptory in the chromatic reduction to black and white, but also less impersonal, that is, more inclined to welcome the alternating events of life. In fact, the Columns are broken and recomposed, incorporate an irregular red insert and always tend towards composure and order, but are variable in the overall composition of the panels left to the discretion of the user. Instead, in the works of the Controlled Gesture cycle, it is the artist who allows imperceptible strips of color to emerge from the rational rigor of black as a shy and reserved sensitive presence. His activity continues innovated in Chromatologies in which the invention of form with 'controlled gesture' combines particular attention to color as a diffuser of light.