The Cavour Civic Gallery in Padua has recently closed its doors Legends (Mapping II).
Legends is the personal exhibition of Julien Friedler (curated by our gallerist Carlo Silvestrin and the art critic Dominique Stella), which brought about a hundred canvases to the Paduan capital, the result of the research work undertaken with the Mapping macro-project, in which the Belgian artist is engaged by the 2018.
The canvases produced for Mappings in these years they differed not only in the different sizes (from the 40×40 formats to canvases over two meters by two), but also in the always very personal use of colour. This collection of works of art , clearly Expressionistic approach , in fact it is a tale of visions that restores to the public the author's powerful creative baggage, the son of a labyrinthine personality fueled by a passion for literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis and travel to discover different and distant realities.
“Like all Mapping's works, these too presented in Legends (Mapping II) are related to this magical expressionism that characterizes Friedler's style, appear as shreds of abstract territories, torn from the earth, from space, a cartography of mental landscapes, linked to Nature itself, profound and essential which is revealed in dreams or in a barely conscious state of awareness. There is, in Mapping, a claim to color and the emergence of an invisibility that serves as a passage between here and elsewhere, revealing thoughts, sensations that reconnect us to life, hope, mystery and the disturbing reality of the world. These works are in the wake of abstract expressionism, highlighting the material and the color used as material”. Dominique Stella.
Legends represents the third stage of a "journey in Italy" that the Belgian artist had begun in the summer of 2020, when about sixty works of the traveling project "Mapping" were exhibited in Italy, first in Palermo And Villa Lagarina , in the province of Trento. After the long lockdown in spring, the two events have traced a sort of imaginary bridge to connect the two geographical extremities of our country, symbolizing the collective need to regain possession of artistic enjoyment in the first person.
“A narrative continuity emerges between the individual paintings, an ideal montage that recreates a schizoid and metaphysical novel, a Joyce's Ulysses in which the mental experience is transfigured in Friedler's liquid, electric, astronomical and alchemical worlds. Imagined in their entirety, the MAPPING paintings become autonomous chapters of a satellite and stereophonic journey, devoid of defined horizons, devoid of a Nordic polarity, devoid of geographical identity". Gianluca Marziani, art critic (Mapping catalogue).