Keeping Up With Milano's Art: February 2023 Issue
It seemed impossible but we made it y’all: we finished another exam season.
We’re off to a new semester, spring is behind the corner, life is good, and it is time to go back enjoying some good art that Milan has to offer. Let’s go through some art scene hot spots for the month of February starting from the new solo show on view at Massimo De Carlo Gallery of Jessie Homer French. I don’t speak as much about art galleries as I do about museums or foundations since their shows are inherently less curatorially narrated than the exhibitions in institutions with no commercial aims, so there is less content to comment or critique on. Regardless, some galleries are so fucking iconic in what they do that you must start to check some out.
The name of the retrospective is Memento Mori. I know, it sounds heavy as hell. I went there sighing that sort of big breath you take before watching a movie on WW2 - like you know it is going to hurt, but it is the crude truth of reality.
Well, I was very wrong, the way her works depicted death left me amazed.
Throughout art history, Death has mostly been depicted succumbing to its agony and torment in a Pietas by Michelangelo way or Saturn eating his son by Goya-like. And surely the American painter Jessie Homer French as well does depict Death, but the way she does it - through her bright, overly-plastic, almost childish colours and playful brushstrokes - gives death a completely different aura. All art is always and necessarily a form of knowledge, and Jessie Homer French’s art is a very peculiar form of knowledge of Death: my favorite canvases were indeed the ones with that surreal cut of the graveyard’s ground, letting the observer peek through the innocent coffins, which is the way in which a child would probably imagine a graveyard, and then, a generative act: flourishing, lush, thriving trees grow from death… visually incredibly cathartic.
Filippo Cortese - a friend of mine and fellow ACME student - works at the Massimo de Carlo which, by the way, is located in a wonderful house from the 30s with stunning marbles and everything, so I had the chance to have him providing our B&A readers a little insight from the inside, and let us have a little interpretative key to familiarize with Jessie’s works:
Thanks Emanuele, Im happy to have a chance to talk about Jessie on this platform. See, the gallery started working with her some years ago, her first solo exhibition was in our London gallery in 2021, and I’m glad we are having a second one in Milan right now. Jessie is such an interesting artist. When one looks at a painting of her they immediately think that a) she’s a man b) she’s a young artist.
That is because her aesthetic is very cartoon-like, and it usually reminds me of LEGOs or Minecraft. You wouldn’t say she’s a 82 year-old Californian woman that’s painting them. One of the themes she often focuses on is Death, be that environmental, animal, human, comprising scenes of water and air pollution, fires destroying habitats and many more. However, when it comes to human death, she doesn’t portray it in a dark and sad way, but rather as something soft and gentle: nothing to be feared of. Moreover, despite the age Jessie is gaining a lot of momentum in these past years. She’s been recently included in the 59th Venice Biennale where she exhibited artworks criticizing environmental pollution depicted in such a kind and impactful way.
Changing topic from contemporary art galleries, my next recommendation for this month is an exhibition at Gallerie D’Italia called Dai Medici ai Rothschild. Mecenati, collezionisti, filantropi. Whenever I get a bit tired of the obnoxious contemporary artssholes of Milan, I seek shelter in the old masters displayed at Gallerie D’Italia: an evergreen art spot in Milan with a very well curated programme, little to do with its questionable neighbour Palazzo Reale which churns out a new blockbuster exhibition every other day and charges crazy prices. Gallerie D’Italia does less but does good, and this exhibition is another confirmation of their curatorial capacity. Also, remember that if you study anything art-related such as CLEACC you can get in there for free!
Curatorially speaking, what I appreciated about this exhibition was how it was constructed in several nuclei representing extracts of the collections of different patrons throughout the centuries. Art exhibitions are never neutral, they always imply a manipulation of artworks and their mediation by curators to the audience, this exhibition decided to shed light on the role of banks and philanthropist families of bankers which supported the arts from renaissance till the last century. In Marxist art history – which is a prominent critical lens through which art history is deciphered – art is tackled as a superstructure of economic and class structures. Thus, the focus is often on the role of patrons being the upper social class which could materially promote and sustain art practices, and how their tastes defined the course of art and the legitimization of the artists as we know them today through art history books. This is why I believe it’s very insightful to leave visible the traces of their collecting choices and tastes.
