Giulia Andreani — [non] si passa la frontiera — Bendana | Pinel Art Contemporain Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 12 → February 23, 2013

Giulia Andreani — Passé, présence Remarquées lors du Salon de Montrouge 2012, les toiles de Giulia Andreani bénéficient, en ce début 2013 d’une double actualité. Présentés à la galerie Bendana-Pinel en janvier dernier et exposés jusqu’au 2 mars à la galerie de l’Escale de Levallois, ses travaux offrent une exploration troublante et envoûtante au cœur de nos mémoires.

Painter and art historian, Giulia Andreani combines historic events and images. For some years now she compilates her “atlas”, consisting of images gleaned from the Internet, but also Italian film stills, archival photographs and other retrieved images. The artist reinterprets the works always with the same color palette, blue, gray. She juggles between figuration, blur, runs and erasures. Her paintings contain messages and decode characters to decipher. They promote cultural, political and economic associations inducing a deep critique of our society.

— Julie Crenn

“Non si passa la frontiera senza aver redatto completamente e consegnata la cedola statistica” — “You can not pass the border without having fully completed and handed over the statistical coupon”

This travel warning in was also found in the passport of Eduardo Cosimo Cammilleri. This administrative language is cold, the formula sounds distant, it belongs to an Italian from another time.

I met his daughter one night in Paris. Sophie Cammilleri told me the story of her father’s family, a story of immigration as there were millions in the 1930s.

Very quickly, a collaboration began with her, an exchange of anecdotes and photographs, documents, letters. Her father was an immigrant, as those who today are crammed in small islands around Sicily, the land of his origins. The story of Eduardo crossed the history of the twentieth century: the mass exodus from southern Italy to escape fascism and poverty, the experience of the Nazi occupation of France, where he was imprisoned for 14 years, his involvement in the Foreign Legion to serve the country that hosted the Indochina War… Fragmented as is the memory, I restore this existence in a small body of work.

An allegory of Life made up souvenir pictures of Eduardo Cosimo Cammilleri becomes the subject of a pictorial research that aims to restore a glance at the history of an era and the fear of oblivion.

— Giulia Andreani