OPENING RECEPTION
Saturday, September 21, 2024
h. 11am-1pm
LOCATION
PUNTO SULL'ARTE
Viale Sant'Antonio 59/61
Varese, Italy
EXHIBITION DATES
September 21 – November 2, 2024
VISITING HOURS
Tuesday-Saturday:
9:30am-5pm
CATALOG
PRESS
Sweet Icons | Bernardi | Diena | Filippini
Roberto Bernardi, a world-renowned artist, exhibits his exceptional works at the SWEET ICONS three-person show by PUNTO SULL’ARTE. Alongside him, artists Valentina Diena and Claudio Filippini showcase their refined works with a strong conceptual charge and exceptional technical execution.
OPENING RECEPTION of SWEET ICONS: SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2024, from 11am to 1pm at the main Gallery in Viale Sant’Antonio 59/61 in Varese. The artists will be present.
PUNTO SULL’ARTE reopens the exhibition season with a powerful trio show. Three artists, three different ways of ironizing and sometimes denouncing the superficiality of our way of life, often focused only on appearance and self-satisfaction. Their works go beyond the canons of hyperrealism, perfectly capturing everyday life with common objects and depicting famous Superheroes transformed into ordinary people dealing with everyday life.
ROBERTO BERNARDI relies on the magnificence of color to demonstrate how appearance is essential in the modern world, a world where we are surrounded by false, polished, and perfect beauty. The exhibition features oil paintings and sculptures depicting candy jars, lollipops, gum, and the iconic “Oreo” cookies. The artist’s intention is to provoke, to stimulate reflection on how something that appears so perfect on the surface may hide a shadow, a hidden soul. “In my paintings, I capture the essence of exhibitionism that prevails in this world, the desire to appear aesthetically better than we truly are. I think, for example, of the profiles that many girls create on social media, especially on Instagram, where they appear so perfect that they seem unreal. Just like candies, beautiful and shiny, irresistible,” emphasizes the Umbrian artist in the critical text. Bernardi’s great art can be found in famous American and European collections, including the Eni collection and the prestigious collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. In addition, between 2022 and 2023, some of his sculptures were auctioned by the famous auction houses Sotheby’s and Phillips with excellent results.
VALENTINA DIENA for PUNTO SULL’ARTE presents the series “Icons”, symbols of the contemporary “wrapped” with white adhesive tape and the word “FRAGILE” in fiery red. The artworks are a clear reference to the great artists of the 21st century, from Jeff Koons to Maurizio Cattelan, and are entirely created with colored pencils, a tool that Diena has loved since her youth. Her work is almost a spiritual exercise, a sort of self-control of the mind, which must adapt to the slow rhythm of pastel drawing. The excellent technique and strong conceptual charge of her works have earned her a place among the candidates for the X VAF Foundation Award, and currently some of her paintings are exhibited at the Stadtgalerie in Kiel (DE). Following the German stage, the artworks will return to Italy to be presented at the prestigious MART Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Trento and Rovereto on the occasion of the award ceremony.
CLAUDIO FILIPPINI, a painter from Brescia, is an important witness and descendant of the Italian figurative research, with numerous exhibitions in public and private spaces and an important solo exhibition curated by Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz in 2003. Often compared to artists Ennio Morlotti and Edward Hopper, Filippini has always painted with oil, which is slower but allows for many more effects than acrylics, as stated in the critical text of the exhibition. On the occasion of SWEET ICONS Filippini wants to inaugurate a new vein of his painting, less canonical and more provocative. For PUNTO SULL’ARTE, he has created a series of large canvases in which the famous DC superhero Batman is confronted with the everyday aspects of existence. The artist performs a sympathetically irreverent act towards those who always take themselves too seriously, demonstrating that superheroes are much more human than we think