Valerio Nicolai
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2023
1988
Italy
Clima
Biography
Valerio Nicolai (Gorizia 1988), lives and works in Milan. He studiet at Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice.
Recent solo show: Sole con le code, Clima, Milan (2022); Birthmarker, Galeria Madragoa, Lisbon (2021);Amarena, Clima, Milan (2019); Heart’s rock and Potato’s spirit, Las Palmas Project, Lisbon; Prospettiva di una matrioska, smART Foundation, Rome; Processo a porcospino, Clima, Milan (2017); Trasformazione permanente di un mago in formica, Treti Galaxie, Turin (2016).
Selected group exhibition: Panorama, curated by Vincenzo De Bellis, Monolpoli; Expectations, Curated b ...
The research of Nicolai questions the limits of pictorial composition and expands it beyond the canvas, incorporating reality and bringing it back to the audience completely transformed. He has not a preferred medium of expression but starts from theoretical imaginary, full of unexpected elements, sometimes guided by irony, and gives to his artworks a surreal context merged with contrasts and fantastic revelations.
This storytelling becomes a crucial element and, sometimes, the actual main character in his practice, intended as an interweaving and exchange between objects and subjects, referen ...
Valerio Nicolai, Sole con le code, 2022 Exhibition view at Clima, Milan photo: Marco Davolio
' Since when I knew that I would have written the text accompayning this exhibition by Valerio I started seeing foxes everywhere. This is curious because his works has starring foxes as subjects.
More precisely, it is human eyes that stare, probably placed at the right place of the skull of a person starring behind the two big betulla panels, mostly painted in crayons, depicting in fact two foxes; on their own with their tails, they wander on an endless ceramics floor fading in nothingness.
Even if I lingered for a moment on an anatomical aspect there is nothing itchy in the experience ...
Selected Works
Lucifero, 2021
' Light as a tactile and chromatic manifestation of pain is a motif that returns in the 2021 series of paintings titled Lucifer, in which we glimpse human figures emerging from the penumbra in which they are immersed by virtue of a reddish light emanating from their knees, necks, and lumbar region. This is a familiar iconography that Valerio Nicolai borrows from the world of advertising, an iconography designed to promote products against muscular and joint pain, and which visually translates the acute throbbing of spasm into a pulsating core of light. '
Alessandro Rabottini, La bellezza del guaio, Flash Art NO. 359 Vol. 55
Chi ci lascia a merenda, 2022
Amarena, 2019
Toilette, 2019 Oil on canvas 178 x 150 cm
' These new series of works by Valerio Nicolai is dedicated to that particular moments when everything we thought we knew falters and certainties fall down, personal apocalypses perceived as absolute, moments in which our vision of the world alters and turns to red.
The title of the show, Amarena, might recall an idealized childhood, an eternal start of summer spent climbing trees to eat fruits, eternal snow cone snacks, ice cream cones bought by grandparents, but it could easily be the name of an imminent menace, a devastating climatic event, a typical storm originated off the Brasilian coasts.
The red dominant of the works is the color of the stage Nicolai interposes between subjective and objective realities in contrast. The texts accompanying every work are like pulley squeaks keeping in tension this stage, facts and quotes once absorbed then forgotten by the store of life, mechanisms triggering and defusing at the same time a possible interpretation of the work. '
- Matteo Mottin
