Santi

Santi (Saints) is a wide ranging monograph on the work of Omar Galliani, an artist from the Emilia area of Italy who for this book has collected more than 70 works created between 1995 and 2007. The nucleus is a dense collection of finely drawn faces in pencil, pastels and pen and ink on poplar panels, some of them very large format. “These faces,” writes Marisa Vescovo in the postscript, “speak to us of an indissoluble emotive charge and an iconographic formula.” And in fact for Galliani the face becomes a metaphor leading to the unknown, to the enigma, implying references to meanings that are actually obscure. Observing these young women – and there are now also some young men – you get the sensation, beyond the physiognomy, of grasping the impulses of the mind itself as indecipherable messages. Now caressed by skeletal hands, now transfixed by long swords, these creatures are portrayed surrounded by flowers or, following Christian iconography, literally deprived of their own hearts. The heads, often ringed by a black halo and drawn with meticulous chiaroscuro technique, have pre-Raphaelite features and, as such, emanate a dark light which in Galliani’s poetics corresponds to the idea of sanctity.

Born in 1956 in Montecchio Emilia (RE), Omar Galliani attended the Fine Arts Academy of Bologna and today teaches at the Fine Arts Academy of Carrara. He has taken part in the Venice Biennale thrice (with a solo show in 1984).