Vortice cotone

Riccardo Gusmaroli, born in Verona in 1963, lives and works in Milan.

He started his activity as an architecture and still-life photographer: elements that influenced his artistic production starting from the early 1990s, the period in which he began collaborating with the Toselli Gallery in Milan, and also his first exhibitions personal.

If in his early works the theme of photography returns, this is often transformed, covered with a thousand signs and subtle colored strokes, to reappear as a plastic form, almost sculptural. 2000 confirms the already fertile exhibition season, with solo shows at various Italian and foreign galleries, among many in Paris at the Studio Simonis, but also in public spaces, such as Villa Sartirana in Giussano.

Meanwhile, Gusmaroli continues with great freedom in his creative research, ranging in the choice of materials and surfaces to be used as bases and active elements of the artistic operation. Here then are the selections of stamps, the "all city" maps, the geographical maps, but also monochrome, white and red backgrounds mainly, on which to create textures of great formal elegance and light poetry with simple reiterated objects, born from the same simple gesture of folding the paper. Boats or airplanes, a minimal operation that requires the strength to "take off" and that characterizes Gusmaroli's research over the past decade. They are the well-known whirlpools of white-on-white boats that reproduce imaginary journeys with impossible routes, the result of associations, sensations and connections that spring from the materials themselves.

A calculated musicality, told by the waves of paper folded in the form of objects related to the theme of travel, unfolds on the works of Gusmaroli, where research ranges from the concept of lightness to the relationships of light and shadow, full and empty, action and non-action. Going back over the years, even wanting to write down some group shows, the important names of spaces and contexts, public and private, where Gusmaroli has been invited to exhibit: from the Civic Museum of Lodi to Viafarini in Milan, with Accardi and De Maria, from the Trevi Flash Art Museum to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Arezzo to the Gallery of Modern Art of Turin, the Vittoriano of Rome, while abroad, his works have traveled from Barcelona to Brussels, from New York at the Sperone Galleries in Paris at the Simonis and Di Meo Galleries with Boetti and Fabro.