Critical text of Julian T’s solo exhibition curated by Annalisa Ramos
Artist: Julian T
Julian T confronts us with the essence of a moment: an impact, the uncontrollable. Every Impact is instantaneous, but it preserves time. The photograph of a moment, which becomes eternal. The black frame abstracts this large stain, allowing us to push our sensitivity beyond the world of figuration, leaving room for perception.
The artist’s research begins with the marvellous simplicity of a small drop falling and crashing onto a sheet of paper, unexpectedly, in a brief instant. Julian T is fascinated by the indomitability of such a linear gesture, exaggerating it across the board and crystallising the ungovernable forever. The result is a painting that does not need to express itself through form, because it is closely linked to being and living. Impact leaves its manifestation to chance; it is out of control. Randomness is a very fascinating element; not having control implies pausing to observe what generates the unpredictable. All forms are metaphors for a state of mind that is identified through the form itself. Kandinsky speaks of the “spirituality of art”, seeing form beyond its own form.
An artist must “touch the inner strings of the soul, for his task is not to dominate form, but to adapt form to content”.
Visual art emphasises a subjective interpretation of the work; attributing one’s feelings to an object or person is an unconscious process: Julian T’s stain becomes a deep black hole, sucking and pulling everything in with it; or explosive force, a mass that spills out, invades and bursts into the room.
The sequence gesture – impact – trace encapsulates a non-linear idea of time, made up of waiting, explosions and sedimentation.
In the Impact project, the execution process is very important, from the choice of tools for creating the moment, to the colour, to the care taken in the launch. Although the fascination with the stain derives precisely from its intrinsic nature of being an uncontrollable result, the creation of each Impact has become a slow and studied ritual for the artist, consisting of precious ampoules that crash and break into a thousand precious pieces, deliberately left on the canvas. These same Pyrex glass spheres, despite being destined to be destroyed, are full of meaning, forged one by one, by hand and flame, by Savona craftsmen and carefully chosen by the artist to have the right roundness and openings.
Hence the need to bring the work to a performative level: the desire to share this experience in front of people, creating pathos and uncontrolled interaction, with the aim of exciting, provoking, stimulating dialogue and encouraging changing inspirations. In 2007, a curator fell in love with the project and Julian T had the great opportunity to show his creation to the world: Impact was launched from a blimp during the Venice Biennale. The artist and his team succeeded in their endeavour, showing how powerful this gesture can be.
The Alchemy series
The works on display are part of the culminating expression of the Alchimia series. Impact, created on gold and silver leaf, is, in fact, the closing cycle of a sequence inspired by Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on the Art of Alchemy, with particular attention paid to the evolution of matter as a metaphor for the construction of the self. The progression of the Impact works in this series began with the use of black and white alone, purely for the sake of creating maximum contrast between the stain and the background. It continued with the need to explore colour, each representing a stage of evolution, starting with the coldest tones and moving on to the warmest shades.
To this crescendo, Julian T finally added gold and silver, as the ultimate expression of this alchemical quest linked to the transformation of a poor material into a noble one. Working and shaping the interactions between materials encompasses a deeper investigation, that of personal growth. Impact Gold and Impact Silver are the ultimate materialisation of the artist’s desire, which places us before the majesty of gold and silver, materials that, since ancient times, have been used in sacred contexts and linked to the divine.
THE FRAGMENT
Also on display is the artist’s latest project, The Fragment, developed in collaboration with the Rossetti Arte Contemporanea gallery. Composed of fragments of canvas, the work is designed to express the concept of Impact from a different perspective, which the artist arrived at after numerous performative experiments. From a level of maximum attention to impact, with a core from which the splashes radiate, the need in The Fragment becomes that of dwelling on every single aspect of the moment of impact. It too is born of chance, a painting that is unsuccessful in its overall composition: Julian T feels the need to cut it in order to retain every single detail, to delve deeper into what it tells us. In The Fragment, every detail is enhanced in its uniqueness, living with its own beauty, composed of diagonals, drops, matter that has clung to the canvas in a random manner.
Impact is a powerful effect, originating from a basic gesture, from the simplicity of the force of a stain. Julian T seeks out and exaggerates this visual impact to show us how natural it is to be moved by simple things: we just need to train our senses to recognise them.
