Riccardo Gavazzi, HORIMOTO

Room 7

«Animals were a formal pretext for me, the truth of their bodies enchanted me and gave me greater freedom of expression and experimentation.»
Riccardo Gavazzi

«We all have our own bestiary. Our own private zoo. We all have our zebra, our gorilla, our sparrow, our elephant, our gazelle. Inside us. It is enough to think about it for a few moments. It is our theatre, our exorcism against the pressure that things exert on us, on our bodies, on our nervous systems. Each animal can always be given a name and surname, a profession, a physical appearance, a torture and/or a joy. Each animal is a playing card, a humble and valuable pawn, useful or harmful depending on when we turn it over. We all have our own system of symbols. Riccardo Gavazzi is a painter of symbols, and therefore of systems (there is no such thing as a symbol if not within a system). Of sets, of series, of repetitions, of variations, of canons. This seems to me to be his artistic DNA. He is not a figurative artist, except for the singular raf-figurative, refigurative, figurative force of his painting. These are not portraits of animals. Rather, they are the overall and essentially unique portrait of a system of symbolic images, which have been showing themselves ever since we call them up to teach children the alphabet, and how over the years they have taken on a whole universe of knowledge, memories, tensions and expectations.»
Luca Doninelli

THE ARTIST

Riccardo Gavazzi was born in Milan in 1982, where he lives and works. He graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. In 2006, inaugurating a painting season entirely dedicated to animals, he exhibited two giant gorillas in the Appiani tribune of the Arena in Milan and in 2007 Rain Dogs at the Obraz Gallery in Milan. In 2008 he presented the exhibition Safari, through a fantastic alphabet of animals, at the B>Gallery in Rome.