" The part game, the part of the game, the symbol as a costume. For some time Giovanni Corallo has been proceeding by themes. Painting enters the social sphere, becomes in some way, social satire, is politically historicized in the criticism of costume. He already spoke of "Lost Queens". Now the "Interni Con S'ignora" relives as a lash at certain noble ladies a glottological misunderstanding a lexical game of the word that translates itself into FORMAL AND CHROMATIC hypothesis ... "
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" The construct of memory is played in the labyrinth of personal iconographic research, enriched with a fascinating and fantastic way of seeing more than things, the heart of them, their bizarre soul, their ability to metamorphose and therefore reach the role of symbol, now dressed in metaphysical flavors, now, exalting it through the tendential search for an interior classicism. Giovanni Corallo wants to tell all this with his "Lost Queens ... "
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" Between the appeal of quotation and the critical reinterpretation, in the key of cultural memory of a "second" renaissance, the Lecce artist Giovanni Corallo chooses to "rediscover" the Lost Queens in order to point them to a new throne, a new royalty; in the context of a cultured painting that gives and returns to them that opulent image of rich suggestion that characterized a very important season of international art ... "
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The part game, the part of the game, the symbol as a costume.
For some time Giovanni Corallo has been proceeding by themes.
Painting enters the social sphere, becomes in some way, social satire, is politically historicized in the criticism of costume.
He already spoke of "Lost Queens". Now the "Interni Con S'ignora" relives as a lash at certain noble ladies a glottological misunderstanding a lexical game
of the word that translates itself into FORMAL AND CHROMATIC hypothesis.
The (unsuspecting) opulent and sensual LADIES appear, seated, reclining, haughty, inviting, at times detached, deaf, malicious in whose game the LORDS (who ignore) often intervene and rarely the family unit.
The foreground is the psychological (but also formal) social mirror, dominated by the female figure who often occupies the entire field of vision of the painting as authentic Pomone dispensers of voluptuous fruits,
offered in cups to replace the cornucopia.
The elements of the painting are there in the scenario, between the scenes, like a stable world, like a visual certainty that supports the relationship between the scene and the artist (the painter), giving the viewer the possibility to perceive the formal and chromatic superimpositions. , in analogy to the overlapping of customs and social relations.
A scheme on which Giovanni Corallo's painting has been hinging for some time and which, in a certain way, establishes an authentic novelty, not only here in Salento.
In this game, whose elements of true painting are present, Corallo approaches the contemporaneity of the history of art of this period which, despite its multiple themes and problems, with its perspectives, retains its authentic physiognomy that characterizes it. .
The use of color is, at times, timbral (I would say almost always) and rarely tonal.
We recall, incidentally, that Corallo is one of those few "experimenters" who, in the 1960s, in Lecce, formed a small nucleus that has never ceased to clearly characterize "research". What I identified elsewhere as emerging, in a certain way, in Salento. Although not in an absolute sense "avant-garde" it was clearly grafted onto the national character of that time.
The construct of memory is played in the labyrinth of personal iconographic research, enriched with a fascinating and fantastic way of seeing more than things,
the heart of them, their bizarre soul, their ability to metamorphose and therefore reach the role of symbol,
now dressed in metaphysical flavors, now, exalting it through the tendential search for an interior classicism.
Giovanni Corallo wants to tell all this with his "Lost Queens.
The gaze of the woman, whether she is queen or madonna, is alive in any case in its ambiguity: in malice and erotic song or along her interior and fabulous remembrance of an infantile and extracorporeal past that enhances the mediumistic-evocative qualities that the "Queens" of Coral possess ancestral.
Yet from the research carried out since the 1960s, through studies that mixed linguistic terms with those that are frankly pictorial-graphic, from the search for singlossic materials, to the laboratory action and from that suggestion to the problems that were dear to the avant-garde, Giovanni Corallo it holds back the primordial atmosphere. He himself declares to remember with pleasure his "youthful enthusiasm for the avant-gardes and the long nocturnal dialogues with a close group of friends and the acquaintance of characters such as Eugenio Miccini and Marcello Venturoli who greatly influenced his artistic training".
A formation that is consolidated in Corallo towards a direction that only apparently (or at least in the technical fields) departs from certain experiments. In the sensitivity of the Lecce artist, among other refined teachers, the lessons on Renaissance painting and above all references and suggestions are stratified, ranging from that symbolic-surreal fable culture of a Chagall to the redundant and baroque expressiveness of a Tono Zancanaro, not neglecting, in some operative "nuances", metaphysical suggestions so dear to De Chirico's culture. And, among other things, the echoes of an environmental chromatic arrangement that remind us of Indian decoration or even that pigment richness that moves with a certain wisdom between archaic models of the figures and abstract modules are not far off.
For Corallo, the woman is a real labyrinth of memory, her melancholy beauty is nothing but a symbol of her own corrosive restlessness. The temple of her dreams is dressed in fiery sunsets or still lifes that illuminate the sky of her absence.
This discourse of the Lecce artist lives on "those existential anthropocentric theses" already mentioned by Bruno Leo, above all, in the relationship that is established between pictorial material and sign, a synergistic interdependence, where, ambiguity is opposed to existentiality.
This existentiality or this way of being a living element of human nature, a dimension of desire, Corallo tries to reach through the perched gazes of his "Queens", fixed in the captivating emptiness of a twilight.
Between the appeal of quotation and the critical reinterpretation, in the key of cultural memory of a "second" renaissance, the Lecce artist Giovanni Corallo chooses to "rediscover" the Lost Queens in order to show them a new throne, a new royalty; in the context of a cultured painting that gives and gives them back that opulent image of rich suggestion that characterized a very important season of international art. The drapes, carpets, necklaces, objects of royalty; they emerge on damask and intense decorative games, while the female image dominates, with haughtiness, the complex compositional architecture and the magical chromatic purpose of Giovanni Corallo.