Galleria Giorgio Persano is pleased to host Giuseppe Lana’s solo exhibition Drifting back and forth, part of the larger research project called Passaggi, recently presented at the Italian Cultural Institute in Madrid (February – April 2023).
In Passaggi the artist investigates man’s need – be he a single individual or an entire community, – to travel over the earth, questioning how this freedom comes into conflict in contemporary reality with geopolitical interests, state bureaucratic apparatuses and reactionary ideologies.
Inside the gallery, large iron girders impose themselves with hostile authority, delimiting the physical space and evoking an imagery of war. Barely suggested, in their austerity and incompleteness they symbolize the spirit with which nations deal with the phenomenon of migration: an effort sufficient to hinder but far removed from concrete solutions.
In the exhibition, the sculptures establish a dialogue with large canvases studded with invisible and silent painting, inhabited by swarms of tiny mosquitoes, “insects that populate an ideal space, suggesting a transit that, in the apparent miniature of the dimensional scale, hides the gigantic dramatic scope of a phenomenon that, inexorably marks the fate of many people and corrodes consciences.” – Agata Polizzi
In Drifting back and forth (“Avanti e indietro, alla deriva”), Lana explores the different natures of migratory processes and their management, recognising how the attempt to stem the phenomenon is often characterised by short-sighted and ineffective policies, in a succession of repetitive and unproductive actions that not only fail to respond to the need to find safe places in which to live, but reduce the movement of the masses to a real struggle for survival.
