Inside Gianfranco Zappettini’s Mesmerising Golden Age Exhibit
The exhibit explores the significance of gold both as a precious material as well its value in the metaphysical sense
Mazzoleni London presents Gianfranco Zappettini’s The Golden Age exhibition of paintings curated by Martin Holman. The exhibition will be open to all from Friday, 7th February until Saturday,11th April 2020, followed by a second show which will take place later in the year at the Mazzoleni Gallery in Turin.
Zappettini is an Italian painter who is renowned to be an exemplar of analytical painting from the 1970s to the present times. He was also one of the co-founders of the International Analytical Painting Movement in the 1970s, which spanned across Spain, Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands, thus making him one of prolific living Italian painters of our time. The London exhibit will focus on a completely new collection of paintings, which explore the symbolic significance of gold both as a precious material as well its value in the metaphysical sense. The spiritual exploration is derived from Zappettini’s extensive personal research on teachings of Taoism, Zen and Sufism; influences which are inherently visible within this body of work.
“While the time of myth is cyclical, there is also correspondence between past and future, between end and beginning, because what has been will necessarily repeat again,” explains Zappettini. Elaborating on the underlying messages within this collection, Zappettini continues, “A new ‘Golden Age’ will follow the age in which we are living-a final epoch, degenerate and stripped of spirituality: this narrates the myth and this may prefigure art, capable of conserving the most profound values and, like myth, of passing the confines of time.”
Zappettini’s artistic method revolves around calm attentiveness where each area of the painting is scrupulously separated from the another. The separation can be differentiated through the density of the colour application and expressed through the respective stratification of the painterly material. For a unique individual such as Zappettini, painting is transformed into a spiritual exercise; the colours utilised within his work communicate to viewers on an individualistic level, relaying a unique, deeply personal message to each that is generated through a connection made between Zappettini’s painting and the observer.
Images courtesy of Mazzoleni London