Kendall Art Cultural Center

Lia Galletti

MONUMENTAL - SOLO EXHIBITION

May 8, 2020

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Lia Galletti is a painter, born in Havana, Cuba and now living in Miami, Florida. She was heavily influenced by her father after seeing him paint, inspiring her to experiment with drawing during her early school years. After moving to New York with her family, she started to exhibit in the city, establishing her style within abstract expressionism. 

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"I have developed my work intuitively and organically through endless experimentation with mediums and techniques which have coincided at this time with my actual expression. My intention when I paint is to capture an illuminated moment or a movement in my life which inspires me to materialize that vision through the alchemy of painting with gestures, colors, contrasts and textures. There is a flame inside which replenishes itself with new images and keeps me moving forward with my work. Each painting has a unique story related to myself which differentiates us from the rest. My goal has always been to be a good painter and to continue to do my work and present it to the world as my painting". 

Lia Galletti

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Abstraction as Liberation 
Some thoughts on Lia Galletti’s new paintings

A number of decades ago Theodor Adorno asked the rhetorical, yet profound question of how could anyone write poetry after Auschwitz? This question also meant, in terms of the visual arts, how could one paint the figure after seeing it mutilated with such brutality? At its worst the response to this has been an art where figuration is so grotesque that it borders on the pornographic. Another response has been the exploration of abstraction, while transcending the limits of formalism. It is in this embattled zone, where I situate Galletti’s newest paintings. 

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These are acrylic on canvas that on the whole measures roughly 60 by 52 inches. The paintings are generally vertical in format, and they are painted with such textural and coloristic richness, that they lack the flat, plastic quality so typical of acrylic paints. The titles, So Far, Oracle, Manifestation, Angel, Friend, Death Dies and Stress, are a kind of poetic shorthand which establishes that these paintings are more than just about painting, but reflective of an open ended narrative that can be both cuotidian and mythical. The spray painted numbers and signs do bring the urban iconography of graffiti to mind, but they are also transcended, reminding us of shamanistic symbols tilling the void of life. 

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These paintings are electric, their surfaces pulsating with a syncopated planar tension that draws the viewer into the composition. The pioneers of abstraction (Kandinsky, Malevitch, Mondrian, and Kupka) forged abstract vocabularies that were grounded in a world of realities. Then came the formalist critics and divested the work of their meanings. Galletti is very concious of this ruptured tradition - her paintings, formally and conceptually have meanings - they evoke the heat of daily life, the lyricism of the urban, perhaps even the desolation of a place like Miami. They are moments of visual liberation, where a stain, a gesture of color can express narrative and meaning, and a sprayed number 6. They are anti-figural epiphanies. 

Alejandro Anreus, Ph.D. 
 

From May 8, 2020 - Jul 10, 2020 (by appointment only)