Bruno Catalano
Amalfi

Thanks to the collaboration between the Venetian Ravagnan Gallery and the Municipality of Amalfi, Bruno Catalano's «Travellers» will “land” in the port of the Campania town, in an ideal twinning between the two ancient maritime republics that will compete in Venice on Saturday 3 June, along with Genoa and Pisa, in the traditional Palio remiero (rowing race).

The four monumental works by Bruno Catalano, a French artist born in Morocco with Italian origins - represented exclusively for Italy by Galleria Ravagnan - will remain on the Amalfi waterfront until the 5th of November.

“In my work I seek movement and the expression of feelings; I make new forms emerge from inertia and manage to smooth them out to give them new life," says Catalano talking about his art. "Coming from Morocco, I too have travelled with suitcases full of memories that I represent so often in my works. They contain not only images but also life, my desires: my origins on the move”.

As Enzo Di Martino wrote in 2017 in the catalogue of a previous Venetian exhibition, Catalano “enacts an unprecedented and surprising expressive strategy characterised by the shattering of the integrity of the figure”.  «Travellers» are, in fact, striking bronze sculptures characterised by the absence of the central part of the body, ethereal characters capable of establishing a dialogue with the surrounding world to the point of identifying with it.

“I am happy to see Bruno Catalano's extraordinary works against the backdrop of the sea of Amalfi,” Chiara Ravagnan emphasises. “Thanks to the Mayor Daniele Milano and the Councillor delegated to Culture Enza Cobalto who strongly wanted this collaboration: in the name of art, two cities that have so much in common in their history meet”.

The Amalfitan exhibition is ideally dedicated to the spiritual journey of each person's life, but also, and above all, to the theme of emigration, as topical today as it was in the past, even in places that are destinations for international tourism. Women and men forced to leave their homes for work or because forced by contingent situations. Like those who left our country for distant lands at the beginning of the 20th century. Their suitcases - like those of Catalano's Travellers - were not only loaded with a few personal belongings, but with dreams and hopes. Journey, escape, exile are indeed universal experiences to which the artist pays homage through these monumental figures that take on a heroic dimension precisely because they are drawn from everyday life.