Valentina Formisano | David Cesaria
“Luci Immaginarie”
October 8 – October 30
Opening October 8, 2024 at 7:00 pm | Borghini Arte Contemporanea | Rome
On Tuesday, October 8 at 7:00 pm, the Borghini Arte Contemporanea gallery inaugurates “Luci Immaginarie” by Valentina Formisano and David Cesaria.
Axes, DNA, Skeletons, Cosmos, reliquaries, powerful images explore the unconscious and the world beyond matter. Paintings and installations, plays of light and shadow, draw from hidden ideas, giving light to a symbolism of memory. “Luci Immaginarie”, a rejection of the rational representation of reality, leaving room for an emotional one. Anatomical systems and body parts become symbolic boxes, X-rays of memories, which press and solicit the collective imagination, giving space to individual interpretations. Luminaries that light up the memory, daily and personal, breaking down taboos and obvious reasoning. Works of strong appeal, which, in the communicative power of symbols, place their true strength.
Valentina Formisano was born in the province of Naples in 1987. She moved to the Marche region at the age of 11, where she lived, studied and worked until 2016. During her studies she exhibited in various shows and won numerous national and international competitions in graphics and painting. In 2011 she won the Brera National Arts Award for the Graphics section and the following year she was a scholarship holder at the Fundaciòn CIEC (La Coruña, Spain). In 2013 she won the Biennial of Young Artists of the Marche for Graphics and the Arnoldo Ciarrocchi Special Award. She graduated with honors and mention for the publication of her thesis in Graphic Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata in 2013; carries out her activity as an artist and laboratory assistant at the Academy of origin for the years following her graduation. In 2017 she moved to Florence to attend the Fondazione Il Bisonte engraving specialization school thanks to the achievement of a scholarship. In 2019 she was a scholarship holder and tutor at the ArtLab master's degree in Graphic Art and Lithography and in 2020 she was a subject expert in Graphic Art and Lithography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, the city where she currently lives, draws, studies and teaches in the main art high schools. She was recently acquired in the collection of modern and contemporary art of the Vatican Museums Library with the 2011 engraving Liberami da me. The curator Roberto Bilotti d'Aragona describes her works as follows: "She defines the stylistic figure that starts from the human body to explore the unconscious and the world beyond matter. Powerful painting that overcomes the distinction between abstract and figurative, between expressionism and informal, exposing the expressive immanence of the body that is existential rather than material.”
David Cesaria was born in Mesagne (BR) in 1976, lives and works in Manduria as a painter, sculptor and architect. After graduating in Architecture in Florence and specializing in Exhibit Design at the Domus Academy in Milan, he enriched his training in Museum Design with Oliviero Toscani at the MACRO Museum in Rome. Many national awards, including "Pagine Bianche d'Autore" for the Puglia region, curated by Luca Beatrice, and the urban redevelopment project in Potenza with Gae Aulenti; first prize "Monumento alle donne del Mare-San Benedetto del Tronto" and third prize in the "Light Tales" competition in Brindisi in 2018; first prize Libera l'arte 2023 sculpture section. Numerous group exhibitions in which he has taken part in Italy and abroad. In recent years, his artistic research has focused mainly on Luminarie pop, a project that combines tradition and sharp irony, and which has led his works to be acquired by many Italian and foreign collectors. He collaborates as a designer with the Seletti brand. The art critic Carmelo Cipriani says of him: “Moving between painting, sculpture and design, Cesaria contaminates the three languages, taking the path of transmediality with a typically pop approach, opposed to the cryptic and serious one of the conceptual artists; a way of making his neighbor more facetious than serious. Through his works he proposes a broad relational spectrum, symbolically included between the smile and the sneer, the joke and the provocation, the familiar and the disturbing”.
