The middle zone

Critique sheet

Mildly alarming. They stand out against acid green backgrounds, against pale sky-blues, against indefinite whites, against pinkish drafts. Sometimes they flutter, more often they are motionless, the Birds of Gavino Ganau.

Feathered creatures that perch on branches, fronds, sticks. Unaware of being threatened, they offer themselves to the gaze in their tender beauty, even if there are thorns under their legs. No naturalistic intent, no bucolic vision in the portraits of these feathers that inhabit The Middle Zone, a middle ground that is also a border. A pass, perhaps. However, a place from which one cannot see the sky, which has no horizons, which has little space. Gavino Ganau resets perspective to zero, in his unreal settings laden with colour. Red, black, yellow, as vital vibrations of light and fragile beings. Children of trees, seed hunters, builders of nests and sounds. Entrusted to a sort of catalogue, as one does with plant species in the pages of herbaria. And safe, for now, from any possible mutation. But set in a vaguely toxic if shining atmosphere. A contrast rendered almost inapparent by the mastery of an author who digs inside his subjects and depicts what is visible and what is hidden. It is often people, faces and bodies that occupy his canvases, telling of a somewhat lost humanity. A reflection extended, in the magnificent series of finches, robins and the like, to an animal world not at all distant from us. In Gavino Ganau’s highly aesthetic allegory, beaks and wings and uncertain directions among the berries, leaves and flowers that continue to sprout.

Not detached but interpenetrated in the concepts expressed in the works set up at the foot of Monte Limbara, the sound carpet composed by Marco Dibeltulue LanDExapeE with an evocative variety of sounds pervades the space.

Biography

Gavino Ganau (Tempio Pausania, 1966) lives and works in Sassari. His first exhibition in January 1998 in Bologna was a reconnaissance of the creative methods in visual art in the late 1990s. In 2001 his solo exhibition at the MAN in Nuoro, then directed by Cristiana Collu, curated by the Roman critic Claudia Colasanti as part of the MANovre review. At that time, he started working with various critics in various group and solo exhibitions. His recent exhibitions and events include the one-man shows “Lost and Found” (2017) and “Veritas” (2019) at the Bartoli Felter Foundation in Cagliari and the group shows “Sardegna Contemporanea, spazi, archivi, produzioni” at the Man Museum in Nuoro “Dialoghi siciliani” (Taormina, 2021), a survey on the state of contemporary Italian painting and “de insula”.

His work was initially fuelled by a confrontation with mass-media languages and popular contemporary icons with works grouped in different thematic strands: more or less complex compositions characterised by the use of filmic and photographic frames. Later, Ganau abandoned the use of images provided by the media to focus on ordinary people caught in disparate settings: interiors, metropolitan spaces and anthropomorphised nature. His recent work is based on a new chromatic and luministic dimension that is more varied than his typical black and white. A new technical approach permeates his painting while remaining tied to his favourite subjects.

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