An interview with Gisella Gellini – Light art, let’s go for it!

Unstoppable, courteous and determined, GG believes in light art more than anything else, and would like to see some action taken, rather than spending time talking about it. Hence, together with Clara Lovisetti and Francesco Murano, Gisella Gellini is organizing her participation to an exhibition of Italian artists that will be held in Frankfurt as part of Luminale 2010. In the meantime, she has just recently published “Light in art”, published by Maggioli. The 78-page volume gathers works by – amongst others – Giovanni Anselmo, Jan Vancruysse and Michel Verjux. The book is an art guide for those who “think they know” about art, “which, instead, is considered as a mere decoration”, she told us at Milan Triennale one Thursday night while waiting for a conference chaired by Gillo Dorfles to start.
Gisella Gellini is an architect “with an interest in the culture of light, in particular, Light Art. She has gained the trust and help of Dr Giuseppe Panza di Biumo to organize works of art connected with this Art form”, her biographies explain. She works with Luce e Colore lab at Milan Politecnico, and one of her latest exhibitions concerns the organization and supervision of Dan Flavin’s installations at Berardo museum in Lisbon, given that, at times, it is easier to hold these events abroad than in Italy, which is poorly lit.

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Light Art in Italy

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Light Blade

by Clara Lovisetti

“Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto (1909)

“Un’azione violenta sull’architettura storica” [A violent assault on historic architecture] at the Villa Reale in Milan. It is in pure Marinetti style that Nicola Evangelisti of Bologna defines his Light Blade: a bolt of lightning that ‘pierces’ a column of the portico of the Villa Reale on the side joining the courtyard of the Galleria di Arte Moderna with the PAC. It is a site-specific piece, but above all, it is event specific given the concomitance with the Salone del Mobile, the huge business and media event which, this year, also included the Euroluce show. Gisella Gellini and Olivia Spatola were the artistic directors and the event enjoyed the patronage of the City of Milan and the British Consulate General; and for the occasion the Consulate presented the exhibition British Design Embassy, curated by Sir Paul Smith in the same venue as the GAM. (more…)

LIGHT BLADE – Um Lâmina de Luz atinge o Património

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.

JAMES TURRELL

Perhaps the biggest land art installation of the world, Roden Crater in Arizona’s Painted Desert is an exhausted vulcan crater bought in the ‘70s by James Turrell as site for a fascinating and complex project, where art asked the technology and science’s help for being able to express per itself.
That’s why James Turrel, who likes to be called an artist and not a scientist, was among the lectures at the Bergamo Scienza congress held in October 2008, where Gisella Gellini and Clara Lovisetti met him. The result of that meeting is a long interview about Roden Crater, its genesis and the numerous meanings.
Says Turrell that if we look at the history of art, at Caravaggio and Titian in Italy, at Velazquez and Goya in Spain, in England at Constable and especially Turner, then at Rubens and Rembrandt, and the whole of the Impressionists, we have a clear idea of the way the artists see and represent light in their paintings. Even if sometimes it is incidental to the work, it is functional to this emotional and powerful framework. Here is the reason of the indissoluble link between the history of art and the painting of light. (more…)