I have known Omar Galliani since the early eighties, from when, within a current of Italian art, he established himself as a protagonist of the modern reinterpretation of modules from varied erudite art, originating from great drawing and sublime painting, in a high commingling of Mannerism and a new Rococo, asserting the right of our time's art to be inspired by an achronous continuity with a past that never passed but remains contemporary. Some, in a hurry to define, called it a moment of citationism, erudite, Mannerist, while, in a more complex manner rich in formal and content implications, it asserted a line of originality, pre-Impressionist and pre-historical avant-garde. The same that had inspired Michelangelo to consider the Belvedere Torso complete and not a ruin, and Canova to refuse Lord Elgin's invitation to remake the missing parts of the Parthenon's pediment. This was clearly a position that, without denying the historical scope of the avant-garde, sought to circumvent it in the footsteps of Pontormo's drawings or Rosso Fiorentino's painting.
A classicist, one might say, certainly, with a creative flourish of Pre-Raphaelitism, in a multi-faceted scope that is precisely eclectic, as Felice Casorati and Achille Funi had been. In this venture, Omar Galliani found himself alongside figures such as Carlo Maria Mariani and Alberto Abate, to forge his own personal path of utter quality, dedicated to originality and never to repetition. Over the years, his forms have transformed, following the progression of his inner monologue, which has become a play of imagination, at times with moments of high calligraphy, at times with moments of free gesture, moving from one form of figuration to another of abstraction, in a line of “Titianism” based on the primacy of colour, in its specific exaltation of visibility.
Omar Galliani possesses a specific wisdom of grammar and syntax, of painting and drawing, but without academicism or folklorism, with a exquisite freedom, as a true protagonist, who follows everyone and no one, as he proceeds with his own imaginary cartography that gradually takes shape, like a flow from the invisible to the visible, which emerges slowly, composing, each time, an alterity, bringing together a multiplicity of components of an enigmatic organism, which will never cease to envelop and fascinate us!
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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