“Feelings, society, objects: complexity of human beings”
Through my paintings, I have met new friends, this culture, nature and landscapes, which expands my aesthetic view in a more broad way.
I work with memory and feelings that marks my being, living with myself in the “here and now”. Hearing echos from my background culture that can be amplified in a new environment.
I approached China with all my love. With my eyes I have had beautiful deep visions of this reality, of its culture and society, of its economic production, that I filter with my personal aesthetic interpretation and research that I call “Rude beauty”.
As my project was to paint about the complexity of human being, I have worked on this topic through my poetic language about the contemporary world, the “Rude Beauty”. As common point of view for every place, I am often upset by simple scenes that collides with my eyes and my sensibility, enabling me to recognize beauty, a “Rude Beauty” in all imperfections of our times. A Kind of blue love song , kind of effort to represent the „Rude Beauty“ of the working class in opposition with the capital global mass media pseudo culture in which just the superficiality of fame and richness allows for beauty. That brings to the attention the forgotten face, a corner of the real life. The artist as witness of its historic time, as social protagonist, as cultural interpreter.
Looking for a painting quality, simpleness, to reach a representation that can be told as honest.
Colors, mixed media, canvases, are my tools with synthesis of symbols, ideas, forms, related in our time in the most brode way to create a new art piece, which is a new image I gift to the world.
Giulia Spugnoli, Shangyuan Art Museum, Art Recidency program 2015
Discourse on Art
I want to paint what I’m living, refuge myself in Art to avoid death, I feed myself with colors and forms, I amplify my voice through image. Painting is an interior travel, with origin and arrive point in the world. Most than ever today, 2014 a.c., Paint is meaningful, most than ever today Paint is itself and show to all others Visual-comunicative media of being still always the most human. I agree with Picasso about Style. There are artists that have a style that’s always the same, maybe for there own individual characters, that brings them to express like this. But for me to have a style seems as I should repeat myself, my creative experience, although that the style in art is recently mostly interesting for art market. My creative process follows various streams, inspiration, to have a vision and try to represent it most directly as possible, through the best pictoric medium or to paint for the pleasure of painting, in colors world, in their abstraction. The serie of still life born from the reading of the writings of Picasso, in which he explains that the represented object doesn’t count much, doesn’t make a big difference, because what is important is how with painting that object become represented. Taking the still life as classic, humble, subject of the Art history, I will be able maybe one day to represent my epoch in a distinguish manner and then maybe through this that seems little things, several aesthetic perspective will reveal themselves.
Giulia Spugnoli, Berlin, 2013
The next Text was originally wrote in french and I leaved it as it is.
Many Thanks to the Author
Le Double Entree
Ouvrez-moi les yeux et je vous direz ce que je vois! A travers les votre, ce principe émotif de toute communication non verbale…le langage séparé de l´inflation imaginaire, cette pure fonction du désir enthousiaste : la peinture est un outil de fluidité qui rend possible ces choses la !…Une mise en évidence du ciel intérieur, une captation sonore de la nuit que nous portons dans le regard, une mise en garde de l´ombre a travers la lumière et vice-versa…On l´aura beau répété mais il demeure toujours aussi vrai que le plus important n´est pas la chose regardée, mais le regard que l´on pose sur cette chose…Giulia Spugnoli regarde toujours dans les yeux de celui qui regarde !
Laissons voir ce qui se cache sous les apparences ! Mettons ces fameuses apparences sur plan bi dimensionnel : primo verticalement…Deuxio horizontalement…Tercio vice- versa !
On : un reportage socio-esthétique ! Des communautés humaines toutes assises à la table de l´égalité ! Quel beau rêve de partage ! La couleur est un autoportrait. La forme est une information extérieure…la peinture est une histoire de nuance entre le vide et la profondeur. Je pense que la générosité de certaines couleurs chez Giulia est une formule de politesse…Elle sourit souvent pour certainement éviter de se mettre a pleurer ! Mais sa peinture en dit plus qu´elle n´enfouie ! C´est gros comme un éléphant au milieu du salon. Et tant mieux, tant mieux…
Off : Un faste néo-baroque éclairé au néon, un univers symbolique typiquement Berlinois, profondément Florentin, avec ces capsules élliptiques que forment a maintes reprises les cafetières italiennes, des tournoiements Soufis d´objets triviaux et d´éléments translucides…, Iron and Wine, du métal fondu dans le vin, ce même vin qui tache les feuilles sèches de l´angoisse perpétuel…un joyeux bordel sensible a la corde de la spiritualité mais qui casse en mille morceaux les violons de l´émotion. Les figures ne sont que spectres, des archétypes de souffrances individuelles et changeantes qui se déplacent d´un visage à un autre, aussi vite que le bonheur… comme une constellation d´étoiles qui dessinent une croix de mort dans la fracture de la nuit…Un constat désespérant de l´humanité qui peine à combattre son propre germe autodestructeur : les fantômes : ces âmes aussi solitaires que ces objets fatalement inertes ! Une certaine nostalgie ?
On/off : Ainsi, j´ai jeté un coup d´œil… je me suis arrêté, car il me fut impossible de faire autrement… j´ai pris le temps de voir…depuis je regarde…Regarder c´est payer sa dette envers tout ce mérite de l´être vraiment et faire la promesse de toujours laisser filtrer, quelque soit les circonstances, la beauté de la vie… La Grande Belleza ! dit-on chez mon amie.
Maguette Fall, 6 May 2014, Berlin
The following text is in German, translated from A. Mudry form the original from Giulia Spugnoli
Stillleben
Das Stillleben wie eine formale ästhetische Erforschung, welches die von menschlicher Arbeit geschaffenen Werke darstellt, die ihrerseits auf eine Abwesenheit-Anwesenheit weisen, auf einen fantasmagorischen, nunmehr verlorenen Gebrauchswert. Wie eine Reflexion über die Ware aus jüngerer Zeit, die stets wichtiger ist als die Menschen, die sie erzeugen. Wie eine Kritik am sozialen und kulturellen Stillstand. Die Objekte sind eine statische, tote Komposition, verweisen jedoch auf ein kreatives Leben, das sie hervorgebracht hat und dessen Fantasmen, Schatten letztendlich wie ein Echo des Lebens wirken.
Giulia Spugnoli, Berlin, Juni 2014
Shendi Veli, Expert in European cultural politics, Interview with Giulia Spugnoli , as a research in the field of Cultural policies, politics and governance.
October 2014, Berlin.
Giulia is a painter, performer and art-therapist, born in Florence and currently living and working in Berlin.
Despite her everlasting interest in figurative only at the university Giulia start investing her time in getting an artistic background: she studied and graduated at the Academy of the Fine Arts in Florence with the maximum of the votes.
According to her opinion this was an important step not only for acquiring some technical knowledge around her passion but also for constituting the step that made her pass from a simple hobby to the idea of “working through art”.
Her work is fundamentally abstract-figurative painting. Her main topics are either related to socio-political issues or entirely abstract representations. She uses different techniques of drawing (oil, watercolours, collage, recycle etc.) and she normally works in her room.
Giulia is now living in Berlin, in the neighbourhood of Neukolln. She decided to move in Berlin five years ago because she evaluated that here is easier, compared to Florence and Italy in general, to find spaces to produce art and people interested to make projects and connections.
She dedicates almost 20-25 hours a week to painting, moreover she define herself as a quick painter, so her artistic production is quite copious.
About her earnings they are very intermittent: “when you sell a painting you can earn a lot of money in just one day, when you don’t you are without income for long periods”.
Considering the long term Giulia says that living as a painter , is hard, that’s why she started working with projects of art-therapy for children and through public funded programs she was able to use her art in a more social and also profitable way.
The strategy that she uses is to write a project based on art activities, and targeted to children mostly with background migration and apply for funds to the Kulturamt or other neighbourhood based public agency Quartiersmanagement (many of them works on the cultural development of the area), the maximum of funds that she received for a project is 2500 € . So this work can be complementary, but still insufficient to guarantee her life on the long term.
The other way in which Giulia organizes her work, is the more typical arrangement of exhibitions. She said that in Berlin it is not easy for an emerging artist to find space in the official art galleries. As well she often find galleries very elitist places where arts and people never get contaminated with each other. However many cultural spaces (cafè, bars, associations) are available at hosting art exhibitions in Berlin. She tries to find spaces that would host her work for free and in collaboration with the place she organizes the promotion and the logistic of the event. This is a way to show her work and become more known in the sector. Normally places don’t ask for a percentage on her peddling, but sometimes that may happen also.
The kind of institutions or agencies that have been important to her career are basically private associations and cultural public institutions. Between the first one she named the Cafè Tasso where she organized her exhibition and that was important for finding more contact in the field. Among the institutions, one of her most important work-project was with the Alice Salomon Hochschule.
The way Giulia gives back to the community through her work is very important for her. Firstly through her art – therapy projects she got to know all the children of her neighbourhood and to create a feedback with them and their family about which are the needs of the community.
Secondly Giulia went in the occupied school of Olauer Strasse and creates with some of her artists collegues and friends a collective mural painting with refugees. She says that in this places there are no organized activities so many people have nothing to do the whole day and do not have contacts with people outside the school, and she thought that art it is a good way to create for them connection in the city they moved in.
Giulia has also been involved in a feminist art project called Femme Fraktale, all the earnings of this project were devolved to Non profit Associations that supports women based in Berlin, as Women in Exile.
The cultural policies that made a difference in her career are those who allow many associations to spread, get funds and to get involved in arts. Moreover, has been for her important the public funding of social projects based on artistic activities.
What she thinks that is missing in the cultural policies is a particular attention to promote art made by women.
Giulia says that despite the appearance, in the most famous museums the work of female artist is still under the 10% of the total art hosted. She wishes that more gender-oriented cultural policies will compensate many years (centuries) in which cultural production has been considered only a male activity, she thinks that since culture is an important part of society a better equilibrium between genders would bring benefits to the whole and would be a way to challenge the “main stream culture”.
The program www.goldrausch-kuenstlerinnen.de/en/ is according to her a very interesting cultural program, but still too limited in the number of artists it promotes.
Testo della Prof. Luciana Pinna, Febbraio 2016
Se i quadri potessero parlare cosa direbbero?
Giulia ci accompagna, attraverso le sue pitture, dentro storie e luoghi inattesi, in un lasciarsi trasportare dall’immaginazione a guardare in modo diverso e profondo.
Ogni quadro una storia nascosta da un dettaglio, un’atmosfera, un colore: ogni storia un mondo.
Si avverte, nei suoi dipinti, un richiamo a certe avanguardie figurative dell’ inizio del novecento, a quella ricerca artistica fatta di spazio- luce-movimento, determinate nel fornire al teatro di Bertolt Brecht e al suo allestimento scenico nuovi moduli espressivi.
I „Due amici che parlano al Sandman“, i commensali di „Underground Szene in Berlin“ sono gli attori del teatro espressionistico tedesco del 1° dopoguerra o del Cabaret Voltaire di Zurigo, dove i dadaisti presentavano i loro provocatori spettacoli?
“Warshauerstr. Berlin”- “Boxhagenerstr.” sono le scenografie dove si muovono quei personaggi che, insieme ai commensali del “Progetto collettivo contro la guerra”, alla donna di “Disoccupazione e isolamento sociale”, anche se attori, appartengono a quel teatro civile che Brecht ha pensato essere fatto per “decostruire le illusioni del pubblico”.
Le opere di Giulia non si offrono a una facile lettura, ma tutte trasmettono immediatamente vitalità, passione e generosità. Tratti distintivi della sua personalità artistica.
Del resto ci avverte ancora Brecht, in un suo provocatorio aforisma, riferibile anche alle arti figurative, che “Se la gente vuol vedere solo cose che può capire, non dovrebbe andare a teatro; dovrebbe andare in bagno”.