C-2019-01 Sculpture

Giovellini is a pseudonym of a Belgian-based artist that has almost 10 years experience in successful selling his artwork through galeries in Antwerp, Knokke, Amsterdam and London. While previously working with mixed media (mostly consisting of butterflies, plastic boxes, wood, iron wire, gold leaf and acrylic paint), his new series of work only contains more ‘traditional’ elements such as wood, canvas and gesso. Nevertheless his artworks are certainly not put together in a traditional way. Over the last years his interest started to grow towards Minimalism, but although his new series of work shows some relation to it, he doesn’t make use of any industrial materials like the Minimalistic movement did in the 1950’s-60’s. In a contemporary world dominated and overloaded by pictures (figurative representations) on all our digital devices, billboards, newspapers, etc., Giovellini’s artwork tries to bring us back to the ‘essence’ whom nobody could describe more beautiful than the famous writer Leo Tolstoy - “All the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow”. With its often rhythmic patterns and monochrome painted surface, the incident light plays a subtle and almost poetic dance on the canvas. As such, his artworks have a meditative and calming effect on its viewers. Giovellini has the skill of being able to visualize silence and a quality of infinite delicacy and tranquility. The artwork becomes a participatory piece, shifting in form and mood through its interaction with light, space and the vantage from which it is viewed. “Light is the simplest, most undivided, most homogenous being that we know.” - Goethe. His abstract series leads us deep into the mystery of artistic creation, a mystery all the more relevant once art becomes non-figurative, once art cuts its ties to the objectively identifiable and becomes unknowable, infinitely interpretable. With his technique, Giovellini has transformed the pure white surface into a silent symphony of light and shadow. By removing the presence of gesture, the work could attain transcendental impersonality, referring only to itself and its own presence. “Three dimensions are real space. That get rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space… Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.” - Donald Judd.