"The Mediterranean,  pretext and ambiguity."

 Is the place chosen by Sandro Galli to plot his recent artistic route. More than a sea, it is the idea of a sea, whose double identity confuses to remove all reasonable synthesis. It is surrounded by land, it is land bathed by the sea; the memory of the departure has not faded yet where afready the trace of an island, a glimmer offlight, a stillprofe, presuppose the arrival : euphoria, anxiety, refuge . . An enclosed sea, but with no easy landing places: island of sea to whom surrender like an Atlantis re-emerged hidden within your own head, a place to land again and to get away from to fix the images, minima! stories, protected by frames and, sometimes, by glass too. The painting is like an island, a portolano, a chart where ... affairs of the sea and the land, the shape of one or the other, reciprocal relationships knowledge and experience: space and spatial conception, the world and the vision of the world . . . are composed. The Mediterranean by Sandro Galli Is like an essence of origin, water to cross forgetting certainties and codification, an air (not only that painted above the sea) like defiance where one lets fly and where his fetish objects fly: colours, paintbrushes, origami planes, playing cards, cigarettes. Like all artists, if we wish to stick to the metaphor, he Is a little bit of a smuggler, an immeasurable provoker who keeps his bearings and trashes yours by elaborating, in his paintings, moments of amused anguish and light tragedies, as if he Is unable take seriously his own life stories that still sting. As I think of those paintings linked to a travel theme - the inside and outside of trains, cars, aeroplanes - I also have in mind the journeys of a glance, those that transport you on high, vertigo and emotion, that make you slip away, at high speed on a boaf keeling over on a green sea, whilst in the sky birds collide, even paper ones. And then our coastal villages, humanised by objects only apparently unrelated. Necessary because they add a supplement of soul which makes the aesthetic real more real than that of nature. That which now only lives in the city of painters. Sandro Galli in the metaphysical Clarity of his canvasses, where every bit of formal geometry is spiritualized to open up to all the many meanings and interpretations, has often tinted the azure blue, colour of poets and children, in scenes clearly articulated by repeated pro files of the mountains that open, in their own way, onto an infinity of Ungarettian make. In this prospect of declared solitude, few signs and, as the artist’s signature, the same recurrent mark : game and irony together, the coloured handle of an umbrella, a bee.

April 1997 - Giovanna Riu