The Carlos Reid Gallery

Gallingani Alberto

Florence, Italy

The social history of art states simply that artistic forms are not just forms of experience that are optically or acoustically conditioned, but that they are simultaneously forms of expression of a conception of the socially conditioned world.

Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of the History of Art

The intellectual expression of the artist, from the moment in which the artist uses art to establish content, is in itself closely connected to the vaster cultural condition of which it is a part. In fact, a content structure in art is acquired starting with individual personal formation, related to personal history and the specific experience, and then opens into an external dimension that involves it and influences it, as often happens in certain political or social contexts. This constant comparison between external and internal reasoning describes the overall direction, ideological suggestion underlying the artist’s subjective vision, the artist who becomes its interpreter.

From the moment in which the external narration encounters the internal narration, it becomes a dialogue, the dialectic of a life experience, a condition of thought that is constantly in flux, the physical landing place for ideas that through art join the voice of the times (both historical and personal) to the sonority of the artist who becomes its privileged expression. The conception of the art of Alberto Gallingani is indicative in this sense. It combines a sense of history with the personal ability to interpret it. It is the experimental externalization of art with expressive coherence as a stylistic constant, the formal balance as a supporter of ideological turmoil.

Alberto Gallingani’s artistic career organically evolved in style from the early 1960s to today (only the last cycle of his works are presented in this catalogue). His career bears witness to this cohesion, uniting the historical material with the subjective material in a constant comparison, using content-related and aesthetic correspondences.

In the sixties, the young artist shared many of the ideas held by the classical abstract school (abstract artists of the Florentine movement, with whom Alberto Gallingani had a true friendship and affinity, particularly with Vinicio Berti), which states that art is the awareness of reality, in an active and constructive way. The artist then intervenes in the reality because he is aware of his role, and he is then conscious of his time so that art becomes a moral and political expression, a constant participation in the history that is happening.

Although Alberto shared Vinicio Berti’s classical abstract theories and formal direction, he always pursued his personal conception of style marked by individual autonomy and individuality in his research.

There was a second important period in which he continued to emphasize the need for a new art that continued to regard the historical time and society as a main point of reference. We are talking about 1969 when Alberto was preparing the Manifesto of New Reality Painting, which focused particularly on the concept of the renewal of art now driven by an “anxiety of truth,” by a need to emphasize the importance of content and history through art as a new moral condition, capable of substantially influencing reality.

"The painting of the new reality, my painting which tells stories of men who seek the freedom! "

Gallingani Alberto

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