MAKING LIGHT | Solo Exhibition by Simone Garofalo

Curated and with critical text by Loredana Barillaro

“Making Light” is the act of building, of crafting. Simone Garofalo does so with great attention to materials, creating works that speak of light and space.

Spaces that at times become constellations, punctuated by elements that recall his nature as a designer.

He tells us of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, but also of Simone Martini and fourteenth-century Tuscan painting, through the abundant use of gold surfaces - so inclined to radiate warmth and energy - together with rounded formats that at times evoke the desco typical of the Renaissance period, if we think of light as birth and gift.

The reference to myth also bears witness to the fragmentation typical of contemporaneity, with its infinite contradictions, within an abstract painting that becomes a manifest will to leave a mark.

Fragmentation as a wound, yet a wound that is at the same time rebirth: ultimately, we do not know whether what lies before us is forming or disintegrating. The “other” elements that the artist gently places upon the surfaces are traces that may indicate where his gaze turns - whether it is painting, dense and concrete matter, or watercolor, light and impalpable.

Yet the palette upon which Simone Garofalo acts, at times with a delicate touch and at others more intense, creates atmospheres that intentionally recall Monet’s water lilies, as well as Kandinsky’s geometry.

In his encounter with contemporaneity, Simone Garofalo - by moving beyond the bidimensionality of flat surfaces - constructs “luminous boxes” in which LED neon merges with gold leaf and ancient wood, and in which the symbol of infinity evokes reflection on the passage of time, on the complexity of a concept that since time immemorial has stood at the center of art, science, and philosophy: time, which in its flow cannot be contained or halted.

Circles, dots, undulating lines in shades of blue, green, and gold. Blue like the sea, the sky, starry nights; blue like the beauty of ceilings frescoed by the masters of the past; blue like the Virgin’s mantle.

Green, recalling the natural element in its many components, develops the theme of memory - the memory of the countryside, of a bucolic world dotted with butterflies and bees - set in opposition to a contemporaneity in which nature becomes artifice and fiction.

Gold, so precious in becoming light, in evoking space, a place that expands, breathes, and becomes a mirror.

Yet Simone Garofalo also chooses the depth of black, a color capable of becoming power through the overlapping of polymaterial planes in which spirituality and knowledge evidently merge.

The artist thus moves on multiple fronts, in search of a path in which the need to “create” becomes urgent - a path in which, once again, light - as a concept of manifold meanings - sets the pace, interprets a symphony, and becomes a privileged place in which to pause and listen.