Macca | Il Pianto dei Vulcani | December 2021

…it is in his evocation of the weakness of the volcano, its solitude, its tears, that Macca strikes a new and memorable note. His subjects, while apparently basking in the waters beneath fiery mountain settings, in reality are a mirror to the frailty of a giant that may be spurting fire and fury but is actually laying the stage for its own solitary demise.

Ferzan Özpetek

Von Buren Contemporary is delighted to present Il pianto dei vulcani, the solo show of young Italian artist Giuliano Macca.

The exhibition centres on the artist’s response to the power and beauty of the volcano. Macca hails from Sicily – a land of fire and water. Dominated by volcanic peaks, Sicily is at the same time an island immersed in water and it is this contrast, the incessant burning and quenching, that forms the throbbing background for Macca’s new creations.

The artist also alludes to an ancient perception of the mountain. In antiquity, mountains were seen as outside the civilized world, as ‘wild’, but also as humanity’s first dwellings, the birthplaces of heroes and as ideal settings for reversals and metamorphoses. These ancestral references are all present, allowing Macca to create an enveloping world suspended outside normal perceptions of time and place.

The gallery is proud to note the involvement of acclaimed Turkish-Italian film director and writer Ferzan Özpetek, who penned the exhibition’s presentation text.

Giuliano Macca was born in Noto, Sicily in 1988 and is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Macca’s first experimentations were in the world of street art and in 2016, he presented a performance work at Rome’s MAAM, the Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere. His first solo show a year later sold out within minutes of opening and in 2018 he joined the roster of Von Buren Contemporary (then known as RvB Arts). The artist’s one-man exhibition in Florence in 2020 marked another turning point in his fast-moving career. Shortly after, Macca made national headlines with a remarkable installation: a 40 x 30-metre reproduction of one of his recent artworks Abbraccio (Embrace) which was extended across a Tuscan square as a symbol of these difficult times.

Macca works principally in oil and BIC pen. Very active on social media, he has accrued a remarkable international following of fans and collectors. His creations for Von Buren Contemporary are in the portrait tradition but imbued with a metaphysical atmosphere rather than a realistic or narrative one. The artist evokes a hidden and emotional world, sometimes employing double images and multiple eyes to explore the complexity of identity and its contradictory elements. The works in this new exhibit are ethereal oil paintings which summon up the dark side of life – nihilism, solitude and longing in a bewitching mix that underscores the fragility of the human condition.

This long-anticipated exhibition has been specially chosen to mark the opening month of the gallery’s new space at Via Giulia 13 and its change of name, passing from RvB Arts to Von Buren Contemporary.

Macca comes down to earth

Accustomed to seeing angels, suspended in a pale, glowing sky, we have now come down to earth – and a fiery, smouldering earth at that. From Heaven to the Volcano – it is hard to imagine a more fitting evolution in the work of Giuliano Macca.

For the volcano speaks of this young Sicilian artist’s own land, of the island that nurtured his gift. We have put behind us air-borne wraiths and free-floating Abbracci to find ourselves below, writhing in steamy waters and red-streaked lakes of lava, heated by a molten flow of volcanic tears. Once again, Macca strikes home – blasting through to zones where sentiment lies sealed or smothered, piercing outer casings and liberating emotions from constraint until they erupt, solicited by the volcanic imagery masterfully created before us.

How right that it should be the volcano now firing the feverish imagination of Giuliano Macca. What better metaphor for this explosive artist? Yet beware! The volcano is the emblem of passion, but, like passion, it can also die, and every volcano risks becoming the victim and graveyard of its own violence.

Apparently supreme and untouchable, wielding awesome power over life and death, even the volcano is vulnerable – and it is this vital but less considered aspect that Macca returns to again and again. His dramatic paintings conjure up of course the more immediate symmetries: the destructive potency and changeable personality of the volcano with its living, breathing functions reflect our own unpredictable existence where dormant or repressed passions are ready to explode from one minute to the next with potentially devastating force. But it is in his evocation of the weakness of the volcano, its solitude, its tears, that Macca strikes a new and memorable note. His subjects, while apparently basking in the waters beneath their fiery mountain settings, in reality are a mirror to the frailty of a giant that may be spurting fire and fury but is actually laying the stage for its own solitary demise.

Ferzan Özpetek