The sign is the earliest form of representation and communication used by Man, who has consequently since the beginning of time relied on signs to express not only his experience with the reality around him, but his emotions, interiority, dreams and memory. It is within this context we may place the artistic experience of the two Italian artists Bruno Gorgone and Jorunn Monrad.

The former, architect and designer, has evolved from his initially rigorously scientific education in architecture towards an artistic expression of an intimist matrix that takes the form of a true emotional ideation of the work.

The latter, originally from Norway, has lived in Italy for about 20 years, and this is where she has developed her educational trajectory at the Fine Arts Academy in Milan, pursuing a signic and symbolic abstraction concretized in a kind of web formed on the canvas through various levels of color.

In both artists the sign is not mere graphic rendition; it is intrinsically and inseparably linked to the color, which represents the other important element in their visual language.

Hence sign and color, the two essential elements of their artistic research, that is also the underlying theme of this exhibition.

As Jorunn Monrad puts it: “My work is rooted in the imagery of my childhood: the snakes of wooden sculptures found in Viking and Medieval Norwegian art, forms created by nature like branches, clouds, the shapes of tree roots. The myths, the mysterious nature has also played a part. I have also done research on the phenomena triggered by what we may define our biological imagery; visions of forms that repeat themselves in states of semi-consciousness may create this kind of visual effects. I have created a kind of module, a kind of biomorphic form rather than a specific animal, that merely serves as the building brick of the structure, which is multiplied in vertiginous and sometimes perhaps unsettling forms. The idea is to create a dreamy, moving atmosphere, that is nevertheless very different from the effects of op art, in other words a less strident, more “natural” effect.”. And we cannot but feel that the atmosphere of these canvases are the same as those permeating the works of the great Indian and naturalized American master Natvar Bhavsar, as for instance like Aarakh VIII and Aarakh IX from 2003.

To Gorgone the reproduction of vague biomorphic motifs does not allude to infantile dreamy reminiscences, but is expression of planning in the name of fantasy, or vice versa: a repeated module, result of what we may venture to define an almost architectural planning of the “scene”, on which the variable, the eccentricity of imagination is grafted, rendered with unreal and fantastic colors that remind of Matisse and his disruptive force.

Gorgone’s composition inevitably evokes the signs of colors of Matisse, of the master’s “gouaches decoupées” from the period between 1947 and 1953, biomorphic compositions made of signs and colors, but also certain “inventions” of a futurist and floral Balla, where the geometric construction and coloristic experimentation prevails on the pursuit of movement.

It is interesting to observe the relationship between space and light in the two masters: in both the space appears destructured, de-contextualized in terms of space and time. The work appears like a kind of textile web that permeates the entire canvas, almost as if it were about to invade the surrounding space in a cosmic expansion.

The web of the canvas cannot but remind of the “weavings” of Anil Revni, Indian artist who now lives in Washington, whose works are true laceworks of color that make the eye and mind get lost in a meditative infinite.

The sequence of sign elements that follow one another in an infinite succession in the works of Gorgone, and that are juxtaposed in those of Monrad, makes the onlooker lose his or her habitual relationship with space, to get lost in a tangle of visions that send the psyche into a dreamy, mythical world.

In both artists the relationship with the light centers on the color itself: there is no chiaroscuro technique, no insertion of light from beyond, no blades of juxtaposed light. Light is created directly by the color itself; light as direct derivation of color, as “spirit” of the color, intrinsic luminosity of color that spreads and expands along with the sign in a kind of labyrinthine vortex in which to get lost.

The signic labyrinth of Monrad inevitably evokes the webs of Yayoi Kusama’s “polka dots” (witness her works Infinity Net from 1965, The Sea in Summer from 1988 and Flame from 1992) but in this case there is nothing obsessive, the artist does not pursue any obsession or hallucination; it is rather a matter of a calm exploration of a signic and emotional labyrinth associated with an evocation of the artist’s own individual history.

However, an attentive analysis reveals that, in both artists, the sign is not mere evocation of a personal unconscious; rather, it is linked to an interior research for individual archetypes, a search we all make in our own individuality, and thus a universal research, shared by all humanity.