Giovanni Korallo, a prominent personality in the artistic and cultural panorama, has dedicated and dedicates his life to Art, Beauty, to the search for new forms of expression, to the ethical and civil commitment that is cloaked in shapes and colors. A path of success, for audiences and critics, which evolves in various stages, all starting points for new developments.

An artistic commitment supported by a deep knowledge of tradition, of the great artists and of the history of painting in its manifestation over time, up to the innovative experiments represented by the various avant-garde manifestations.

Korallo participates directly in it, embracing and interpreting the Neo Dada Pop trend in original ways, which also contributes to making known, at first through the experience of the "White and Black" cultural center, then founding the “Prisma Group” together with Toti Carpentieri, Salvatore Fanciano and Bruno Leo.

A new and fruitful breath of air that shakes the artistic and cultural environment of Lecce, always full of ferments, but often in need of stimuli that win distrust and a certain laziness.

The goal of the Neo Dada Pop is that of an art that enhances objectivity; the work is configured as an agglomeration of different surfaces and materials that combines formal rigor and the impromptu and experimental action of the gesture.

The artist's horizons are further expanded with the subsequent participation in the "Gramma Group", a lively association of artistic research, to which the magazine of the same name on which the artists of the Group write; among these the same Korallo, Fanciano, Leo and others such as Vittorio Balsebre, a complex and complete artist with intense experimentalism, Vittorio Dimastrogiovanni, who reinterprets classical antiquity in unprecedented forms and Alberto Buttazzo, who combines the use of typographic inks with original verbal-visual interventions, with interchangeability of elements and materials.

Thanks to its innovative value, the Gramma Group is included in the visual poetic movement of international scope of the "Singlossie" of Brescia: another fundamental experience in the artist's education alongside that of visual poetry, through the collaboration with the magazine "Techne" by Eugenio Miccini, poet, painter considered the initiator of visual poetry.

At the same time Giovanni carries on experiences in the field of conceptual art with important installations in Florence, Holland and Belgium.

A phase follows during which he studies the world through the eye of the camera and the camera, which will bequeath his attention to the object, to the portrait. It allows him, in fact, to grasp the ambiguous, contradictory, relative, multiform, changing, "experiential" character of reality, which he will bring into his canvases and will be the substance of his original evolution.

Returning to his beloved painting, in fact, he treasures all these artistic-cultural experiences that are added and interact in a dialectical way with those of personal life that is enriching with roles: husband, father, teacher, as well as son, brother, relative , friend.

All come together in the becoming of an original, well-defined style, with a characteristic and characterizing imprint, typical of an artist in continuous evolution who welcomes and re-elaborates ferments and suggestions of various origins, including the Baroque and Mediterranean ones, imprinted in the DNA.

The dedication to painting leads Giovanni Korallo to organize successful exhibitions, from his Lecce to Salento (Brindisi, Martano, Manduria, Nardò, Otranto, Taranto, etc.), to the whole of Italy (Caltanissetta, Catanzaro, Civitanova, Marche , Florence, Milan, Pisa, Rome, Serra San Quirico (Ancona), Sulmona, Turin etc.), to the whole world: from Graz in Austria, in Spain (Madrid, Bilbao) from Nice to Lisbon, from Nairobi in Kenya, in Dallas in the USA.

These are flanked by the National painting exhibitions, a virtual exhibition with the emblematic title "It is as if I had written the novel of memories", which declares the awareness of an art that has its roots in personal life; to add the exhibitions of the beginnings with the Gramma Group, the conferences in the university field, the group exhibitions such as the one in Lecce in November 2014 in the Castle of Charles V entitled "Parallel paths".

The latter saw him as the protagonist, together with his longtime friends Salvatore Fanciano and Bruno Leo, in highlighting the development of research paths in different directions which, however, draw on and compare with shared experiences and are therefore "parallel" . In the exhibition, in fact, each of the artists explains their complex creative itinerary, indicated in each of the subtitles. Fanciano: "opus tessellatum", Leo: "urban iconographies", Corallo: "portraits & portraits", a title that underlines the link of Korallo's art to the image, to objectivity, also interpreted through the use of photography, starting from the self-portrait and its metaphorical and symbolic variations.

There are therefore numerous ways and places in which Giovanni Korallo has brought his multiform variegated artistic talent and his ever-growing visual message which, as mentioned, finds humus and inspiration from artistic-cultural training experiences and draws on full hands from the events of personal life. To these is added a look at the world attentive to nuances, contradictions, critical in the Kantian sense, which represents, exalts, denounces, also making use of a non-geometric but emotional use of perspective and of the expressionistic distortion of shapes and colors.

In the artist’s multifaceted phenomenology, however, basic values ​​remain unchanged, as Bernard Hickey well observed in presenting the "Tangos" exhibition in May 2002 in Lecce, at the Conservatory of Sant’Anna.

These values ​​are: the sensual strength of color, the fullness of the sign, the musicality, the artist's gaze that caresses all of humanity, from the apparently cheerful, to the painful, to the aggressive.

Korallo also expresses through his works a whole range of feelings and emotions: abandonment, joy, waiting, loneliness, fun, the sweetness of the feeling of love that is embraced in the variety of declinations, agape and eros, Beauty in its various possible expressions.

A production in which conceptual, emotional and ethical dimensions are intertwined, linked by the red thread of a painting that increasingly combines classicism and avant-garde, tradition and experimentation, so much so that it deserves the title of "second Renaissance" or "Italian Renaissance" , as the title of the Nairobi exhibition sounds.

An art rich in messages and meanings that stands out for its multiplicity and which also invites contemplation for the pure aesthetic pleasure of admiring a beautiful work.

The art of Korallo is in fact an art of majestic formal perfection, with attention to the smallest detail to be discovered, such as that of the Renaissance, and by a use of color that is classic and at the same time very modern, as well as the atmospheres in which works are immersed, timeless yet linked to the present; in the same way the subjects and characters represented that have a contemporary yet universal dimension, as is typical of great art.

A painting of apparent contrasts and contradictions in which static and dynamism converge, collide and recompose themselves.

A symbol of this harmonious intertwining can be considered the hair of the "lost queens," the '' eternal feminine "which are thick, compact, static in the well-defined hairstyle, and at the same time wavy like the sea that , lapped by the wind, it ripples with movements, like a cloud, like a sail.

Painting of action and movement, of sensitive impressions like that of Caravaggio, Korallo's painting finds its specific dimension in musicality, in a music that becomes dance and, at the same time, in the ethereal and sensual universe of 'artist, is "objective" in particular in the tango, protagonist, from the title, of the exhibition, previously mentioned in 2002 in Lecce, preview of the one in Lisbon, at the Italian Cultural Institute.

"Sad thought that dances", as Enrico Santos Discepolo, poet, musician, composer and director, defined it, tango is the couple dance par excellence, in the enchantment of a meeting of gestures, balances and contrasts, of communication of bodies, gazes, souls.

The tango, to which Jorges Louis Borges has dedicated a series of lectures, is a city dance, metropolitan which, born in Buenos Aires; right from its inception it is also considered an attempt to identify immigrants, often Italians.

With the arrival of success and international recognition, the primitive ostentation and swagger without sadness disappear, to make room for elegance, refined and somewhat melancholy sensuality, in a continuous renewal of characteristic figurations.

This is the transition from “tango-milonga” to “tango-cancion”, which found in Carlos Gardel the most illustrious character of him, capable of giving vigor and universal success to this extraordinary, multiform dance.

The milongas, a term that also indicates the typical places where tango is danced, are generally local with a small space that facilitates improvisation, one of the characteristics that connote the originality of this dance, based on physical empathy among the dancers.

In fact, the tango, a dance with many figures, is built by them from time to time through communication between them, with the public and in the management of the space available.

All these aspects can be found in the works of Korallo which, not by chance, entitles his exhibition “Tangos”, in the plural, written in a graphic that is both angular and soft and that literally translating “tangos” would be an understatement.

In "Tangos" the atmosphere of the various forms of tango is returned: the popularity of the original milongas, the embrace, the sensuality; the metropolitan dimension is highlighted, the passion underlined with bright colors, the attention to gestures that always appear different and new, despite the rigor of the technique, is represented.

In the paintings the aphorism of the tanghero Carlos Eduardo Gavito is realized "The secret of tango lies in that instant of improvisation that is created between step and step. Making the impossible something possible: dancing silence "A silence that seems to surround the dancers, which finds" voice "in the elegance and passion of the movements and looks. In the background it seems to “feel” the rhythms of Gadel's Cumparsita or those of Astor Piazzolla's bandoneon which act as a counterpoint to the representation of the world of the Americas.

On stage the "Comedie Humaine" with everyday characters, landscapes and metropolitan places on the stage of life, a life that moves at a dance pace.

The 2009 exhibition, in the rooms of the Castle of Charles V in Lecce, from. title "The Rooms A Matter of Glances", an anthology of thirty years of artistic creativity by Giovanni, almost a pause and consider the path in a difficult moment also in life.

The "rooms" are those of the castle that houses it, but above all the interior ones, which constitute the essence of the self and its inspiration. The 1986 "research" work is emblematic, where five "inhabited" architectures rest on an Ionic capital. The Object, recurrent in the works, a symbol of awareness of the classical roots on which research draws with lucid ability, is in turn resting on the head of a pensive female figure. Places, rooms, of the mind in which the past also condenses? "Exiled thoughts" how do those that, in the form of a nest, hover over the "dreamer" (1986) look like?

The term "rooms" - as the critic Toti Carpentieri notes in the presentation in the catalog of the exhibition - recalls the "rooms" of the classic poetic composition of the song, therefore "stanzas" of life to be delivered to posterity. Carpentieri cites as an exemplary and illustrative model the song "Women who have intellect of love", one of the most perfect examples of Dante's Stilnovism, in chapter XIX of "Vita Nova", a turning point in which the great poet, deprived of the greeting of Beatrice, she stops looking for happiness in recognition by her beloved, to put it back, no longer in an egocentric dimension, but in that of the disinterested composition of verses in honor of her.

"Carpentieri observes in the song - composed of five rooms, (as many as the rooms of the exhibition, as many as the" research "architectures), of hendecasyllable verses, each with a scheme (...) of fourteen lines (the same number of works present in each of the five rooms) the author confesses to the women "'i vo'con voi de la mia donna dire…. To deflate the mind. " (Carpenters).

Nor should another connection be excluded, that with the Vatican Rooms frescoed by Raphael, four rooms in sequence full of absolute masterpieces.

The five rooms of the Korallo exhibition are also in succession and each have a name: “Contemporary”, with metropolitan scenarios; "Strictly personal", in which the artist's private dimension is revealed; "Lost Queens" dominion of a haughty royal femininity that tells of castles and women who exhibit a prosperous physicality and seem to wink at the next room entitled "Black socks", an object-fetish redundant of references and meanings, to reach the last room of the journey-path: "The sky in a room", a title that in itself opens up horizons, comes out of the walls of an enclosed space, to touch the illusion of infinity, enclosed in a tender embrace.

The continuity of the itinerary is also subtly indicated by the choice of indicating, in the catalog, which accompanies the exhibition, the titles of the works with a lowercase letter, which neither interrupts nor highlights strong punctuation marks.

Another reference, suggested by Carpentieri himself, finally links the rooms of the exhibition with "The rooms of Dzyan", a hermetic work of 1888 written by Helena Blavatsky, according to her, interpreting the iconic language of an ancient Tibetan book , "The Book of Dzyan", is considered to be among the oldest in the world. detail that leads to the ancestral dimension and to certain surreal and mysterious atmospheres of Korallo's work, which suggest distant parallel worlds, sometimes mysterious, imagined beyond a window, a mirror.

The leitmotif of this journey-journey-discovery is the female figure; a desired figure, loved, dreamed, represented in a wide range of situations: thoughtful, dreamer, maternal and mother, sensual, erotic, elegant, refined, distant or detached, instinctive, naked with a sometimes complacent and florid nudity, but never vulgar , Nordic and Mediterranean, sumptuously dressed or in any case in elegant clothes.

Korallo loves brocades, silks, velvets, usually red and blue; polka dot fabrics, usually white, on various backgrounds: red, green, brown, in models from the fifties and sixties, perhaps reminders of important, attractive female figures that the unconscious makes emerge and visualize; examples are "remembering d’annunzio" (2000) "portrait of the dancer juanita rejna" (2002), "happy family" (2005), "waiting room" (2009).

They strike the gazes that scrutinize, investigate, caress, which now escape, now meet, now are lost in the void or intent in a vision perceptible only to them; from room to room one encounters deep, sincere or astute gazes that now stare directly, now seem distant, now sideways, all telling of a rich and restless world to be discovered.

In this intertwining of gazes one gets the impression that the last work of each room refers with the look to the next one, and the first to the previous one, symbolically and visually reproducing the path up to the last room, in which the the eye seems to look out with fear and curiosity at the unknown of the future.

Looks that decline all the possibilities of the act of seeing and become an innovative synthesis "Seeing or scrutinizing? - asks Carlo Alberto Augieri in reviewing the exhibition - Observe or peek? Or spy? Can it be a target? " these are doubts that, according to the critic, arise in front of the gazes of the characters of Korallo's painting, a visionary, ecstatic, yet biting, imaginative and dreamy painting, sometimes raw yet real in which there is a "need to look at a tension to renew the very act of seeing. ”

A look defined as "intransitive", as it is endowed with an "excess" that allows not to discover everything and for which "everything does not stop being hieroglyphic and pure veil, beyond which the invisible asks for a second view , another way of seeing ”(Augieri).

Looking differently, looking beyond, identifies another characteristic of the exhibition, that of being, alongside an individual path, also an anthology of citations of works and artists, "revisited, or" seen "with a different look: from the Junoesque forms of Botero to the "pomone" of Marino Marini, to the lightness of Chagall, as in the work "Sposi" (2005) or in "Happy family" (2003) and the Russian artist also shares the joyful, suspended atmospheres . Here we find the metaphysical painting of De Chirico, expressly mentioned in the work "a De Chirico & company" of 2003, but also Frida Kahlo whose face is reproduced twice, as in a mirror, in the background of a painting entitled to her , also from 2003.

And again we find references to Ingres' nudes and his "Turkish Bath," in the complex work of the same name by Korallo "Turkish bath" from 2009, in which "La grande odalisque" by the French artist is also mentioned; to Picasso reinterpreted in circus subjects; Degas winks in 2007's “picnic”.

Clear is the reference to Titian in the title of the 2008 work "sacred love and profane love", although the atmospheres are different from the Renaissance work. Similar considerations for "breakfast on the grass" which takes up the title of Manet's work, with some greater thematic connection than Titian, but offering different atmospheres, even in terms of color. These are "quotations" which, while emphasizing the continuity of the artistic dialogue, are reinterpreted with the unmistakable imprint of Korallo, capable of elaborating these influences in original and unprecedented forms.

Moving from room to room, from room to room means moving in the world built by Giovanni Korallo over time, it means participating in the evolution of his soul, always new, always consistent with itself, always open to future developments.

From the soft colors and the lightness of the outline of "objectifying" of 1981, in which a very sweet woman chair-mirror Sky supports two children, or of "waiting" (1989), we move on to ever more decisive and conscious forms in the purity of line and colors.

The succession of a theory of different women is striking: women musicians, actresses, single women, women who seem to wait (something or someone), women in company, in groups, women in interiors furnished with care with sofas, curtains, mirrors , as “musician” and “monica, both from 2000; women in the mirror, women paired with a man, as in "mare di settembre" in 2003, in which the lighthouse in the background has the familiar lines of the "lighthouse" of San Cataldo, the beach of Lecce.

This beach was also the setting for the ecological sculpture installed by Giovanni in 2005, a sculpture that draws inspiration from the other "sculptures" that form the background of the 1970 "Big woman" work.

There is no shortage of couples: joyful couples on the swing, a typical object of the eighteenth-century entertainment told by Fragonard, who communicate a joyously and sensually playful sense and not the Rococo grace of the French artist.

There is no shortage of family groups indoors, the "happy families", or outdoors, as in a "trip out of town", where the subjects appear crowded together perhaps to indicate the claustrophobia of certain family traditions.

Tango dancers follow one another, scenes of metropolitan life like Hopper, the artist considered the forerunner of pop art. But Hopper's colors, even the most decisive, do not communicate the vitality, which always becomes a characterizing figure in Korallo, with a sanguine, Mediterranean character. And to Hopper Korallo pays conscious homage with “I dreamed of dancing a tango in a painting by Hopper” (2003), almost wanting to “contaminate” the metropolitan solitude portrayed by the American artist with the rhythms and movement of Latin America.

The restless and disturbing bust "in-faithful" deserves a special place in the exhibition, already exhibited in 2004 at the Triennial of Sacred Art. Here Corallo, in the unprecedented guise of a sculptor, transmits a message of denunciation of all forms of imperialism: political, religious, racial, against war and violence, justified by the arrogant presumption of having God on one's side. Hence faithful in which the word negates itself and reflects the polarity of points of view.

The denunciation of the aberrations of the faith-power union can be found in the work "Rifles and Faith", not present in the "Rooms"; in it the red of the American flag turns into blood behind a young man in the act of screaming his despair, not only existential, Munch docet's "Scream", but also the historical one; once the emblems of culture were demolished, the classic column was transformed into a support for instruments of death.

The critical representation of a world of violence finds a space for denunciation in various works that stage it in its darkness and in the pain it arouses; it is the case of “eulogy of violence” (2004), a paraphrase of the famous Erasmian work which denounced the merits and vices of the madness of human beings; or even in "Naples by night" (2004) which represents and condemns violence. It also insinuates itself in the "provocation" work of the same year in which a "vicious" humanity is represented on two levels, without judging it.

These are works exhibited in the same "room" and on the same page as the brochure whose "aggressiveness" is "lightened" by the joy that the "swimming pool" infuses, also dated 2004, with an image bearing the trace of the myth, recalling the Homeric episode of Nausicaa in the Odyssey: three girls play ball in the blue of the water that reflects a sky dotted with tender clouds, in the background rigorous architectures reminiscent of De Chirico, the pictor optimus.

The dynamic and graceful images of the “circus in the city” are a praise of the light and gymnastic physicality. They are among the works in which the joyful, playful element, the divertissement (also in the Pascalian sense of "distraction", of "not thinking"), prevails and illuminates the room. and the pages of the catalog, placing Korallo alongside artists such as Antonio Possenti and Francesco Musante.

They express, together with others, a joyful sense of life, which is another characteristic of Korallo's art and which illuminates everything with a subtle, intelligent, affectionate irony.

A message of denunciation of consumerism is present in "Santa Marilyn of Hollywood", a work that expresses in its own ways the teaching of Andy Warhol (2003), multifaceted artist, leading figure in the Pop art movement, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. From Marylin represented in the work that has the significant title "still life" of 1999, with a crowned blue face. in contrast, from the blonde hair (the halo?), resting on a basket of red fruit, which takes up the red of the lips, we move on to this triumphant, chromatically brilliant Marylin. The halo, however, a classic emblem of dignity, of social value and, in Catholic iconography, a stigma of holiness, is transformed into a Coca Cola cap on the head of a beauty icon par excellence. Marilyn Monroe, portrayed in all the attractiveness of her and with the ecstatic expression of the saints, holds in her hands, with carefully lacquered nails, an ex-vote and the flag of the hated USA.

After all, as Bernard Hichey points out, the cult and veneration of images unites modernity, the Byzantine Greek Church and the Catholic Church, perhaps underlining a continuity (or a need) of man, even in the transmutation of values, from the moral to the economic ones of consumerism, “advertised” with a similar iconographic module.

Art thus becomes a moral commitment to criticize and denounce a society that improperly sanctifies mass-produced goods in factories, vulgar symbols of a modernity that has made individualism and consumerism its fetishes.

The artist continues this message in the work "the death of taste"; in it a pistol, an instrument of power and death, which endorses human stupidity, is aimed at a woman's face of classical perfection, with large astonished eyes, whose gaze seems to turn questioningly to the viewer; in the background a part of the inscription Coca Cola, the drink that has become the emblem of consumerism.

The 2001 work "hotel lampedusa" is instead a denunciation of exploitation and prejudice in times that are certainly less suspicious than today.

These are works that express the sense of responsibility towards others, the participation in the pain of the least, also this dimension rooted in the art of Giovanni with an empathic adhesion that becomes image and image that becomes word and music, a capacity which finds its apogee in the aforementioned "Tangos".

In Giovanni's path there is also the ethereal moon, distant, distant, ambiguous, romantic and disturbing, the star dear to Leopardi and Chopin ". In "io e la luna" (2001) an anthropized moon is grasped with satisfaction, and one would even say with effort, by the man of the couple who lives among the branches, on the top of a tree with green foliage (which recalls the dress of the female figure of "trip out of town"). The whole seems to represent the dream of the couple sleeping under the tree whose man wears a headdress that recalls the famous "sweethearts" of Peynet, a delightful lyric note. In the background you can see and glimpse figures, ghosts, mountains in a suggestive, Freudian polychromy: perhaps the happiness desired and achieved by two, at least in the dream.

The relationship with poetry, inherent in the formation of our artist, had found its apotheosis in "Wilde and Korallo", an exhibition-meeting in 2000 at Palazzo Adorno, with recitation of poetic passages by the English poet, linked to works of the Salento artist, and accompaniment of Celtic music hinted at the flute. An event coordinated by Prof. Hickey, an admirer of Korallo's art, which highlights the subtle connections between cultures, which art is able to make clear and of which Giovanni becomes a spontaneous interpreter.

To Wilde, in particular to Dorian Gray, the artist is also connected through a fetish object that often recurs: the mirror, also archetypal, mysterious and disturbing, behind which parallel worlds can be imagined. The mirror that at times "reflects" and at times deforms, at others it "reveals", at others it tells a desire. In the work "in the sign of twins" (moreover the zodiac sign of John) the implicit reference to the duality of the sign represents the duplicity of the vision: a prostitute looks in the mirror and finds in it the dream of being a modest wife and a mother prolific or is it the other way around? A military man with the Italian flag in his hand (husband? Duty? Authority? Law?) Partially steps out of the frame; in the background other figures that reflect the rest of the environment or are they part of the dream?

The horizon of the dream is also fundamental in the path of the Rooms; she finds herself as a keyword in the titles or in derivative terms as a “dreamer”. Dream / illusion, dream / desire, dream / sleep, dream / reality: of the various declinations of the concept, the latter would seem an oxymoron. Yet art reveals that the dream is not just an escape from present reality, as in common thinking, but how, on the contrary, it can complete, perfect, build reality; become a goal to be pursued, intertwine with everyday life until it merges with it, making it live up to expectations. John demonstrates that he believes together with Shakespeare in the "Tempest" that "we are made of the same substance as dreams", because. as Hermann Hesse said, reversing the perspective, "there is no reality other than that enclosed in us and for this - he concluded - many people lead an unreal life: they take external images for reality".

Another leitmotif of the exhibition is color, a color that is energy, emotion, sentiment. Red stands out, a particular red, Korallo red, because Giovanni made his name an objective correlative with polysemic values. A red with intense shades, the color of passion and passions, of blood, of joy, a color that in the name, c (k) orallo, also speaks of the long and patient work of the sea in creating beauty, shaping, like an artist , the shells of small polyps that multiply and thicken in symbiosis to form incredible wonderful barriers. Moreover, the red coral (corallium rubrum) is the only one present in the Mediterranean, the "mare nostrum" which tells archaic stories and myths and modern tragedies, the cradle of civilization, the scene of battles and encounters that are in the cultural formation, in the heart , in the art of Giovanni.

Red is flanked by: blue, in all shades, from blue to cyan, from cobalt blue to Klein blue to those of the sea and sky; green, which is also modulated in various ways, starting with the brilliant one of nature, and then the whole color palette that Giovanni masters with competence, mastery and ... magic.

But it is the red that dominates in most of the paintings or at least proposed in some particular. It is found in the apple that always appears in different ways: in evidence or subliminal, as a decorative object, in baskets, baroque, loaded with fruit that often appear in the interior, on a curtain as a decoration, in clothes or in some detail, as an element of female figure.

Also a symbolic object since the dawn of time, the apple is part of the collective unconscious. Associated with the myth of the origins and the archetypal figures of Adam and Eve, it is an object-emblem linked to temptation, to sin, to a rebellious desire for knowledge; in the classic myth of Paris and the three goddesses, it is linked to the selection, to the choice pregnant with consequences. In Korallo's art there is also a clear reference and homage, in addition to Magritte, to the period of Pomme art of which the artist was a pioneer and exponent.

A particularly beautiful and significant work in the exhibition is certainly "Juliet and Romeo Thirty Years Later" from 2008, which was not chosen for nothing as the cover of the catalog. A hug, the poignant memory of the love of life: Juliet and Romeo, Giovanni and Rita, the initials exchanged as the exchange of a love that wins time. Complementary love like the chromatic harmony of the clothes: her red one, his blue one, like the similarity of the faces to the subjects in reality, like the enveloping embrace and the looks that smile complicit, to the rhythm of a music that only to them it is given to feel, and to a dance that suggests the movements of the tango. I remember, hug, nostalgia, now that fate has separated them, but she is in the heart, in the mind, in the works.

The physical appearance of his wife, muse, woman of the family and shrewd organizer, a solid point of reference, often appears in the female physiognomy, in the color of the hair and in family situations, as an attentive and loving presence; but also sensual; in the same way, some male features recall that of John. Artistic transfigurations of a real life made of art, family, daily love, joys, pains, loss, of finding oneself in the sublimation of painting.

From Juliet and Romeo to Orpheus and Euridice: stories of indissoluble loves. Once again the background is music in its enchanting aspect, but the representation expands as it enters the myth. Hence the title "Korallo Variations on the myth of Orpheus", a myth at times ambiguous in its development, ambiguity underlying the two upside-down figures that stand out on the cover of the catalog.

Protagonist Orpheus, one of the most illustrated subjects in literary, visual and musical works, who is represented by Korallo in eleven graphites all from 2011 and all of the dimensions 50x70 or 70x50 (magic numbers?), from the representation poised between mythology and dream, once again a key word, through fantastic images, sometimes scenographic or disturbing, such as "The black man".

In them Orpheus is told in search of the golden fleece with the other Argonauts who have archaic and primitive facial features: Orpheus face to face with the monster who guards the fleece; Orpheus listening to the sirens song, bewitching like the music of him taming wild beasts and convincing the gods to give him back Eurydice, who died from the bite of a snake, a well-known symbolic presence of temptation and sin.

Orpheus' impatience, perhaps even his distrust of the promise of the gods, will induce the hero to turn around and, in the search for his gaze, to permanently lose his Eurydice.

An interpretation of the myth sees in this turning around and losing it the impossibility of going back or being as before, therefore a need for failure for Orpheus' enterprise, as happens in her life.

The work "The farewell of Orpheus to Eurydice" seems to support this hypothesis. In it the heroine, in a disturbing dreamlike context for colors and images, reminiscent of Dante's Inferno, turns her last glance to a perplexed and uncertain Orpheus, as if handing him the apple she is holding, a symbol of choice, of selection. , the woman's farewell of temptation, desire, shattered dream.

In addition to the apple, other typical elements can be found in these of Korallo, such as the snake, trees, classical architecture, the sea.

Eurydice now appears with a florid physicality, already present in other works, now with almost adolescent features; now in a serene context embellished with decorative elements, as in “Euridice”, now in a scenario that would like to be a source of anxiety, but which dissolves into the subtle, good-natured irony typical of Korallo. This is, for example, the case of "Eurydice and the snake" in which the latter has disturbing human features and seems not to want to try, but, with implicit references to contemporaneity, use violence against women.

The intense chromatism and coral red also return in some works; the distorting mirror that unites "Eurydice and Hades" "with the work" de chirico e company "(2003), exhibited in the Rooms, returns.

The technique of ecoline colored pencils gives lightness to all the works, from the almost monochromatic ones of an orange reminiscent of Matisse, to those in which the taste of bright chromatism dominates and in which white sometimes becomes the color of a ghost reality , of non-being.

What are the future directions of research for Giovanni Korallo? There is talk of a new emblematic character who is close to the artist and his path: Don Quixote of La Mancha.

He is also associated with a woman, Dulcinea del Toboso, a peasant woman whom Don Quixote mythologized by seeing her as a princess, whom he loves without having ever seen her and for whom he becomes a knight-errant fighting for her.

The figure of Don Quixote is an ambiguous character, one of those that inspire John. His figure is, in fact, an emblem not only of a historical and social crisis, an ironic parody of the knight, but it can also represent, beyond the temporal contingency, those who continue to fight despite everything and against everyone in the name of values ​​considered by mass obsolete, outdated, illusory, but in which they proudly believe, because they represent the best of humanity. He represents those who do not want to give up and do not want to give up dreams. Of these, as of the last of the earth and of society, art must be the spokesperson, mirror, metaphor and analogy.

It is full of characters and situations that Giovanni will be able to take, rework and return, narrating them in his own way.

The art of Korallo therefore in his path has built and continues to build a world of beauty, of a culture of reflection, and denunciation, of rediscovered and revisited myths, of commitment that knows how to speak to those who look / admire.

A sensual, sensitive, meaningful art, all terms that have the same etymology from the Latin sensus with multiple meanings: sense, sensation, feeling, sensitivity, ability, intelligence, thought, symbolism, judgment. Meanings that are postponed and completed, discovering unprecedented semantic relationships.

Giovammo Korallo in the continuum making of his art between dream and reality reveals a peculiar way of understanding and living life that involves family, friends, the public, feels the responsibility towards others, does not deny the past, makes homage to the woman, to his wife / wife / mother, to feelings, to the "concreteness" of dreams, represents in images the contrast and harmony of situations and actions and leaves its mark.

It is an art that is Intellect, Gesture, Emotion that become line, color, music, dance, song of Denunciation, of Peace, of Hope, of Beauty, Harmony, of Love., able to make the enchantment of people, landscapes, situations, feelings and overcoming the tyranny of time.

With affection, admiration and esteem MariaRosaria Montinaro