Biblioteca, 2014, Massimo Giannoni
Oil on canvas, 110cm x 140cm
Provenance: Galleria Russo, Rome.
Massimo Giannoni is an Italian artist living and working in Florence. His paintings simultaneously bear the influence of the Italian old masters, with a contemporary sense of anxiety. Reminiscent of the grand architectural interiors displayed in the paintings of the Renaissance, he brings together the formal and the expressionistic with a technical multiplicity that remarkably cohabits a single plane. Giannoni's preferred subject matter is the bookshops and libraries of the world, living environments where books spill off shelves, are left open and half read, each filled with knowledge.
Artist Statement
I have always been a regular at bookstores and was fascinated by the colours of the book covers lined up on the shelves and by everything that those covers contained: many stories, lives and destinies. In public libraries and bookstores, what prevails is a sense of conservation and orderly cataloguing. The books are ready to be extracted from the shelves to reveal their stories and the destinies of their writers. In private spaces, on the other hand, books have been accumulated and used by different generations of the same family. What I meant to represent is how a change of one generation can turn what was order and reflection into disorder and abandonment. What survives is only the perspective of the empty shelves that extend towards infinity, beyond the picture frame, waiting for a new generation to restore order and accumulation. (1)