The Magic Gate W.H.Y. Gallery Hong Kong
31.3 — 17.5 23
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About
The Magic Gate W.H.Y. Gallery Hong Kong
31.3 — 17.5 23

W.H.Y. Gallery in collaboration with A plus A Gallery is delighted to present “The Magic Gate”, the first two-person show of Italian artist Giulio Malinverni and Bulgarian artist Anastasiya Parvanova. Giulio Malinverni and Anastasiya Parvanova have both studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, and for both painting is the medium to explore the micro and the macro Cosmos. The Magic Gate, symbolizes a portal, to time (present, past and future) and the Gate to the spiritual realms. In their paintings, the vastness of land, sea and the universe becomes the major background. The canvas becomes a wonderland which reveals the artists’ exploration of the personal and collective memory, human relationship and imagination. The exhibition initiates a dialogue of the two artists on their visual manifestations of their minds, dreams, and poetic realms.

 

Portal to the Past and Future, Real and Surreal

Born in 1994 in Vercelli, Italy, Giulio Malinverni lives and works in Venice. In 2016, he received the certification of the Restoration Technician of Frescoes and Stone Material at the Veneto Institute for Cultural Heritage. In 2020, He received the 1st level Diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice where he attended the painting course directed by Carlo Di Raco. Since 2017 to the present, 3 solo exhibitions are held in Venice and Padova. Giulio Malinverni’s work develops around issues relating to the representation of places and contexts that recall situations and forms rooted in collective memory and embrace duo elements, past and the future, land and sky, brightness and darkness. His works are inspired by the mythical Roman God – Janus Bifrons, the God of gates and transition. It symbolizes the origin of everything who’s in charge of the beginning and the end, the entrance and the exist, alluding the contradictory in human and nature. The mythological god Janus Bifrons is described as having two faces, front and back, facing the past and future with his double gaze that stretches over two horizons and contains two temporal extensions. Like Janus, Malinverni embraces the firm soil of the past and the hazy state of the present. The imagery from which his works draws his energy retraces the symbols and stylistic accents of pre-Renaissance painting, re-elaborating their contents through an approach of weighted lightness, open to the rhythms and languages of contemporary society. All these elements, reworked in a personal key and with a vein of irony, suggest a polysemy of meanings to the viewer. His deep understanding of Medieval Renaissance paintings and his experiences in frescoes further enhanced the surreal elements drawn from medieval illuminated codices and events that sedimented in the archetypical. Malinverni stages an ongoing dialogue between the constitutive parts of the work, that are bound by a stylistic, conceptual nexus or occasionally a hidden meaning.

 

Portral to the cosmo, dreams and spiritual realms

Born in Burgas, Bulgaria, in 1990, Anastasiya Parvanova lives and works between Venice and Sofia. After graduating in Visual Arts and Pedagogy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, she continued her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice where she attended the painting course directed by Carlo Di Raco, graduating with her MFA in 2022. Parvanova has been living in Venice for more than 10 years. Parvanova is fascinated by quantum physics, constellations and dreams. The artistic universe of Parvanova can be described as a constellation of fragments and places, emotions, and revelatory encounters. The canvas becomes an investigative journey in search of unlimited facets of possible and impossible worlds. Her explorations interpret the realms as a continuous alternation and transformation of thoughts and experiences, of energy and matter. Her inner cosmos comes to life on the canvas and develops into a narrative of epiphanies and visions. Stars explode in the artist’s paintings suggesting inner earthquakes that disrupt the flow of space and time. The cosmic dust leaves its traces and transforms the canvas into a cloud of infinite possibilities and layers of interpretation. Through painting, the artist tells us about the potential of an imaginary and emotional space. In this space the world is constantly changing, breaking down and recollects again, due to an evolutionary process that shows us the phases of nature and the most intimate dynamics of human relationships. The encounter with the other has a fundamental importance for the exploration of oneself and emerges through analogies with the laws of physics that regulate the nature of light. Like a scientist of quantum physics, Parvanova is attracted by superposition, by the fact that light can be at the same time a wave and a particle, that can be at the same time in two different places.

 

Wave of Light and the intertwining encounters

The nature of the wave of light, like the nature of relationships, consists of intertwining encounters, or opposing paths that never intertwine. The instant that interests the artists the most, is a singularity, a bridge, the precise interval in space-time, that allows the passage from wakefulness to sleep and vice versa, from life to the afterlife and back. This moment is depicted by Parvanova by using the image of the portal. Images of doors and portals throughout space and time are marking in her works the moment of emotional change and the exchange of ideas. Parvanova’s work tells us about a turning point, a defining moment, a pivotal experience, and she marks it by using the chromatic shades in her paintings. In the piece “Plasma” (2020), a blue star in the distance continues to burn while in the foreground three hands move in a dance that feeds a fire — a gesture that recalls a ritual. These two pictorial elements leave room for a sinuous blue and violet panorama that creates in the eye of the beholder a moment of most intense tranquillity where the viewer can contemplate the exquisite delicacy of the visual harmony.

 

Both artists compose the paintings in the backdrop of vastness – whether it is in universe, in land or sea. Space and fluidity is elicited. The portal, to them, is the gate to explore their mindscapes. Connecting the past and present, Parvanova and Malinverni are intrigued by the surreal and subconscious elements that relate to them. Both artists manifest an innate ability to create multiple worlds within a single composition, where essentially and ultimately, that forms a harmonious and unified whole.