Ego Nebula
“ Solitude has the great advantage that you stop running away from yourself.”
(Marcel Proust)
120x200 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018
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This work begins with the inner urge to find a path of one’s own through unfamiliar and abandoned terrain. It is a story of getting lost and finding one’s way again. Engaging with the mountains often becomes an engagement with death itself — a thought that also feeds the enduring fascination of the Totes Gebirge.
In this work, Giovi makes memory tangible and moves away from usual working methods, materials or techniques.
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Classical painting is combined with chrome spray paint, ornamental structures and plaster. Over the course of this long creative process, the artist undergoes a process of learning as well — searching for the path that ultimately gives these works their foundation.
It is about letting go of escape, consciously forgetting old paths and remembering the twists and turns of one’s own life. “You can’t go very far in a straight line,” as the Little Prince once said.
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Giovi’s works reflect the breadth of his memory: mist, like smoke, veils rugged rock faces. Narrow ridges make their way through a metaphorical mirror that holds scenes from the journey in its golden reflections. Almost icon-like, the Zwölferkogel rises above the landscape, its heights echoed deep below in the Almtal like an inner reflection.
A spectrum unfolds that, on closer inspection, is not merely an image of an artist’s journey, but ultimately turns into a mirror for the viewer as well. The works around Totes Gebirge are not only fragments of a wanderer’s memory; they also open up space to linger, to walk alongside them and to see with them. And perhaps, too, to let go of one’s own wanderings along the paths of the past.
Text: Romana Stückelschweiger,
Mural Alter Schl8hof, Wels 2018
