…the landscape
Stefania Galegati and I come from the same part of Italy, she from the province of Ravenna and I from that of Ferrara, two territories separated by the Comacchio valleys, with their swamps and thousands of streams that flow into the Adriatic. We belong to the Northeast’s great plains of hard land, wine and water. Ours is not the futuristic twentieth century of the machine, but the saga of farmers’ struggles and socialist leagues. My grandfather was an anti-fascist who left Mesola in the thirties for Lazio just outside Rome, where I was born and raised. I thus know little about the land of my origins but Stefania tells me about it through her work and visionary sensitivity. Echoes of the immobile plains, wide open spaces and forgotten tales set the tone and specific flavor of one of her latest works. In Untitled (2003), a large photographic polyptych made up of five compartments, a group of characters moves across an immense flat country landscape. As if in a Morandi still life, houses, landscape, and people compose a subdued, uniform discourse that stirs a range of complex states of mind, unfathomable emotions and startling secrets. These are ultimately none other than the places in which Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo CarrB invented metafisica, with its remote images and allusions to a secret unknowable reality, in 1916.

…the tale
There is a part of Stefania’s imaginative sensitivity that belongs to the archaic layers of being, a place in which her quest converges with folk tales and ways of telling. Not content to dwell upon the contents of narration, the artist also explores the subjective mechanisms through which the stories are told, the way in which oral culture is received, preserved, and passed down. Such is the case for example in ten paintings (Untitled 2001-2003) dedicated to ghost stories told to the artist by people convinced they had actually lived them. Peopled with tiny apparitions such as a knight in armor, a girl dressed in black, two monks, etc., the paintings are executed in a hyperrealistic, analytical pictorial style. As a result the atmosphere is neither gothic nor surreal but such that the fantastic element takes on a physical consistency or reality. These are strange apparitions in ordinary circumstances, elements that tend to open a parenthesis within the image and that allude to the coexistence of diverse realities within the same model of representation.

…the energy of history
Through the use of tales and a type of imagination that has its roots in mythical thought, Stefania tries to open a fold in the physical world, in reality. She wishes to offer a glimpse of a higher space that can’t be bound or reduced to rational thought alone. Acting upon the viewer’s own perceptual mechanisms, Stefania attempts to create a gap, a void within our visual and cultural habits, for habits are, as we know, the enemy of vision. We look only at what we are already familiar with and fail to grasp those things completely new to us. Some of her most successful works focus precisely on this type of lapsus and these kinds of perceptual mechanisms. The video entitled Orrizone assoluto dell’evento (1999) is emblematic in this respect: In it the actor Ivano Marescotti stumbles into an invisible object while walking across a city bridge. He examines and explores its interior until he is swallowed whole, to reappear afterwards whistling as he walks away on the same city bridge. The irruption of incongruous, unexpected and enigmatic objects in the real thus tends to upset certain visual and mental automatisms, and confers upon the image produced an irreducible ambiguity. For an exhibition near the Tour Fromage in Aosta, the artist realized a performance with Orfeo Orlando, a bearded artist of small stature, who ran through the crowd at the opening while screaming as if obsessed to then strike static poses while making perplexing and disturbing faces. This character recalls ancient myths and legends typical of the population in alpine Italy, such as that of the Wild Man, a kind of primordial being at the origins of culture. Half animal and half man, the Wild Man lives on the fringe of civilization and inspires both fear and fascination, attraction and repulsion. He is himself the emblem of an unfathomable and irrational energy that breaks through into the real. He represents the repressed in each of us, that which we sacrifice and lock away in order to live together.

…enigmatic force
While this character from alpine culture alludes to an invisible mythical force, Samurai, a terracotta sculpture from 2000, represents the very receptacle of an extraordinary physical and psychological strength, for its belly harbors a small quantity of radioactive potassium. Samurai is the paradigm of a potential force, both vital and active. A group of small paintings on wood panels representing bunkers allude to the same concept of energy. They are in fact architectural forms that refer to bunkers solely through analogy -abstractions therefore- immersed in a neo-Gothic lunar landscape teeming with enigmatic moods. This painting recalls Ottone Rosai’s crisp elementary spaces and measured doses of chiaroscuro. However, the link here to the Italian pictorial tradition goes even further back, for these paintings recall the first experiments of 14th century landscape painting by artists such as Maso di Banco. As is the case in her photographs, sculptures and installations, Galegati’s paintings seem interested in what the image can refuse to state, that’s to say in what it can suggest rather than represent.

…the poetry of things
In some cases, Galegati’s blend of magic realism takes on what are clearly more poetical and onirical, at times even fable-like, connotations. Take for example the video entitled Dove si racconta di profondi sospiri e lunghi pensieri (1999) in which two mighty caterpillars face off in a battle recalling the tapestries of medieval chivalry. Through this video the artist accomplishes a poetical tribute to Western history and myth on the one hand, while seeming to celebrate the dawning of the twentieth century and the heroic civilization of the machine on the other. The video Passeggiata in paradiso (2002), a work dedicated to the memory and resistance of partisans against Nazi-Fascism, refers instead to a more precise historical dimension. Edda, a former partisan, sees a televised interview with Garibaldi, a mythical resistance figure, which starts her reminiscing about her past actions during world War II. The memories of that period fifty years ago prompt her to set out in search of Garibaldi. The two meet, now old. They dance together and then make love without ever exchanging a single word. As two nude bodies they escape the dimensions of myth and the hagiographic thread of thousands of resistance tales to become real, present and alive. History as a subjective tale, lived by men and women of flesh and bone, is the poetic history of individuals who age and not of abstract figures, it is the tragic and at the same time sublime affair that signals the passing of youth but perhaps also the persistence of the dream’s energy and life’s intensity.