The Galleria dell'Arco in Palermo is pleased to announce the opening of Effetto Stalker #2, the second part of a trilogy conceived and curated by Helga Marsala. The first part of the trilogy, mainly centered on videoart and photography, featured artists like Andrea Galvani, Margherita Morgantin, Sara Rossi, Eli Stertz. Painting, however, is the language chosen for this second part, where a new battery of prominent artists from the national and international scene address the theme of landscape: Franceco De Grandi (IT, 1968), Angelina Gualdoni (USA, 1975), Om Soorya (IND, 1977), Ivan Bazak (UA, 1980), Chow Chun Fai (CN, 1980), present previously unreleased works, realized ad hoc for this exhibition.
The project is organized as an articulated ensemble of paintings that establish an interior and evocative relationship with landscape, without adhering dogmatically to any documentaristic or realistic approach. The natural as well as the urban landscape become mindscape or dreamscape, the core of which is exemplified by keywords such as trespassing, passage, desire, metamorphosis. The places observed by the artist's glance emanate hidden energies that are lyrically and even surreally transfigured on the canvas.
The title of the exhibition refers to Stalker, the cult movie by Andrej Tarkovskij that narrates the initiation of two men under the expert guidance of a "stalker" toward a mysterious place animated by uncanny cosmic forces. Here they find a room where they can make their most intimate desires come true. The movie is, then, a journey through an alienated landscape of the mind, dotted with mental deceptions, onirical suspensions, philosophical elucubrations, and hallucinated visions.
Stalker never becomes the direct subject of the works presented; rather, it functions as visual filter, thematic source, and poetic device. Letting themselves be inspired by the atmospheres of the movie, the featured artists re-invent landscape with a gesture that involves a reflection of the relationships between film and painting, real and illusory worlds, physical and psychological spaces.