camillo gannelli - Senza titolo

A material that becomes landscape.

The work is a tactile, profoundly impactful piece, halfway between painting and sculpture.

The canvas is divided into two clear chromatic horizons. At the top a deep, charcoal-black, granular, almost cosmic hue, dotted with luminous dust like a night sky. At the bottom a wine red, garnet, velvety and earthy, occupying the lower two thirds.
On this bi-chrome the artist implants solid fragments – fossil wood, bark, charred stone – arranged with a rigor almost musical.

In the upper left, a solitary vertical element. On the right, six small marks aligned as a constellation or a ladder that descends. Below, in the amaranth zone, about thirty scattered fragments forming a village, an archaic alphabet, ruins seen from above.

This is the work’s strength. It isn’t a painting to be looked at; it’s a piece to be brushed with the eyes. The sand, the mineral pigments, the resin that holds the fragments together create a tactile, lived surface. The contrast between the powdery dust of the background and the organic hardness of the wood generates tension and warmth at the same time.

What does it tell? For me, it speaks of the memory of the earth. The black above is the night of time, the infinite. The red below is the emerged earth, blood, clay. The fragments are what remains: relics of a civilization, bones, houses abandoned in the desert, signs of a lost alphabet. It is a poetic archaeology. There is solitude, but also great dignity. Nothing is casual; every fragment seems weighed, as in a Morricone score.

It doesn’t shout, it whispers. And precisely for this reason it endures.

If I had to place it in an exhibition context, I would define it as: informal material abstraction with a strong poor-art component. It recalls Burri for the material, and in some ways Burri’s “crette” and Kiefer’s cosmic boards.

A mature, balanced work that works wonderfully both in person — where the three-dimensionality of the fragments catches the light — and in photos, where the chromatic contrast bites through the screen.