Opening reception 22nd of november 2012
Galerie Agnès Monplaisir is pleased to present the Italian artist Girolamo Ciulla, for his very first Parisian exhibition, bringing more than twenty marble sculptures and some of his drawings.
Ciulla’s artistic pursuit is strongly characterised by the subjects he depicts, which are disposed to create his own complex and mysterious mythology, one that recounts the richness from his homeland and that is at the same time, deeply connected to the classic archetypal model.
In Ciulla’s Olympus we meet with masculine and feminine forms, and even if the latter, by intensity and frequency, manifest themselves as decidedly stronger, an equilibrium is guaranteed by the certainty of the possibility of their mutual encounter. The stele is masculine, a vertical element, a column of life solidly planted in the earth that reveals Ciulla’s figurations high-up at its summit without fear or hesitation, like living altars into a single, vital afflatus.
Ciulla represents ancestral deities in hieratic and solemn poses arranged on slender columns. But also a bestiary found in the Egyptian mythologic culture, where lunar creatures proliferate surrounded by a totemic charm: the owl, marked by the gift of prophesy and linked to the cult of the dead; the ass, emblem of obscurity, of instinct, of matter subordinate to spirit; the swine, which embodies dark inclinations, greed and lust; the crocodile of heraldic fixity and the monkey on the boat of the dead. All timeless creatures poised at the border between two worlds.