Specially created for the gallery’s evocative spaces, the exhibition La Legge Della Giungla (The Law Of The Jungle) marks the artist’s return to Milan after five years’ absence from his city of origin. Giovanni Frangi is an artist whose poetic approach has always been based on a powerful relationship with the concept of local environment, but his ties with Milan go much further than just a piece of information in his biography.
At such an important time for the city, at the height of its post-industrial re-invention not just as regards architecture but its entire urban identity, Giovanni Frangi has decided to return here to present a show that is not simply a description of the city, but rather a gift, a new vision, a summary of all the worlds that he has experienced during the course of the “nomadic workshops” that he has developed in recent years. La Legge Della Giungla can be considered as a significant moment, a pivotal event in the artist’s oeuvre, following his recent exhibitions Lotteria Farnese at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, Alles Ist Blatt at the Botanical Garden, University of Padua, and Mollate Le Vele at MAXXI in Rome.
The exhibition comprises some large-format works that create an Arcadian, even primitive atmosphere, dominated by nature. The canvases virtually become screens on which a forgotten reality is projected, perhaps in conflict with our everyday world: they are populated by motifs of tropical inspiration, with branches, leaves, shrubs and lily ponds. La Legge Della Giungla does not just suggest a nostalgic return to a life in harmony with nature, but rather it is intended as an examination of the difficult relations between nature and city, presenting a new vision, and a new interpretation in which there are the seeds of the possibility of surpassing a conflict that has always existed.
Could it be that La Legge Della Giungla is an unavoidable destiny? Could it be that, due to an unexpected conjunction of destinies caused by an invisible framework capable of acting as a regulator of functions, nature and the city can in fact be allies, notwithstanding their opposite concepts of space and matter? La Legge Della Giungla is the no-man’s land on which the two factions meet, after the battle: the city is no longer an enemy of nature, but its development, continuation and projection.
La Legge Della Giungla is nature that becomes urbanized, populating the virtual spaces that are an essential component of much of today’s contemporary urban life. La Legge Della Giungla is the interaction of different worlds, with different territories overflowing one into another. «The black background of some of the paintings is a reference to the spaces of a cosmic reality», says Giovanni Frangi. «Vegetable shapes that grow and are nurtured by space and virtual dust. It is as if instead of blossoming from the soil, the ground of the city, the jungle were claiming the sky, filling it with a spatial, cosmic and universal world of green». The reconciliation between these two worlds can only begin from man and his capability of accepting the absence of frontiers, something that is a feature intrinsic in contemporary reality and its technology.