Grey Arras Painting

Manuel Gardina's pictorial research begins with a profound figurative investigation, where the attention falls on artists who have managed to achieve great abstraction by figuratism and vice versa. Tasting the sensation of extreme affinity with the brush and materials is a critical passage for him. Moving to abstraction forced Manuel Garidna to change from scratch, starting again with different means in the research of color and its nuances. Back from his studies in London, he moved to Milan, where he spent years in an artistic residence, he entered in a collective. "An experience that has led me to better understand my research, pictorial and formal". Sharing the spaces with the artists, including former students at the Brera Academy, imposed a daily confrontation with them, working in the same place led to a relationship of profound dialogue. This has sanctioned the end of a path, which is already being lost in itself; proof of this are the latest works, which have begun to adopt decidedly abstract shapes, in which the figure was used for habit. Back in Brescia, he focused more on the abstractions that surrounded his works, on the unpredictable uncontrolled ramifications of the gesture, to the point of electing them to work itself. The ripples of color, the visible and strong sign had widened, assuming important valences as charged with such a signifier. He therefore changed his compositional point of view, although reusing the same sensibility, perceptible in his figurative compositions, expressing it through a different gesture. "At that moment, figurative and abstract were the same thing to me: a discourse that focused on balance in space, sense of colors, brightness". The Zen.Zero meeting was a moment that allowed him to get out of the schematic and limited outline of the canvas, to go to the wall. Here the traits started to expand again and the experiments took on different peculiarities. It was this loss of rational and spatial boundaries that impelled them to growth, so as to create a similar condition also in the studio. The violence of the gesture has been mixed, with the unconditioned nuances in a language that has continued to enrich itself, fragmenting itself. Manuel Gardina's large-scale works are a perfect synthesis of the very early academic mannerism and of the furious gesture of street art, within a result that may live on a different sensibility. What was previously uncontrolled, casual or unexpected, is now consciously reported on the canvas, in a redevelopment of the unwanted taking his revenge to the eyes of the observer.