Dogon Style Wooden Panel Mali XX Century

Oil on plywood

Charles Moody (1979), oil on plywood. Signed on the back. The work was exhibited at the solo exhibition "Borderland" at the Gallery 8 in Milan Corso Venezia, as evidenced by the paper to the back lable. Charles Moody graduated in 2003 at the Art Institute of Boston and, after three years in Milan, chooses to live in New York. In his art the focus at trial (conceptual art, process art) rather than to the image content and it is in this scrap that painting is at its best. An art that was created by the approval of television images (almost never films) and in particular from popular soap operas. Moody's work goes beyond the mass media image by customizing the selection for special images that, in his view, offer a potential narrative; are images of transition, moments of transition from one scene to the next. The artist uses a manual oil painting to reproduce the low quality of the tv picture extolling the "blurring" of blur. We are facing a loss of spatial dimension, in a temporality confused-diffuse-intangible which is difficult to recognize the boundaries ("Borderland"). In these perceptual distortions, in which time dilates expands, each painting represents a "indiscernibilità" in which the recognition of the object that takes second place. The time of Moody is neither Chronicle nor history but suspension. (From "Charles Moody, Borderland", curated by Gianni Romano, exhibition catalogue, CorsoVeneziaOtto, November-December 2009)

Urba Flower 2016

Mixed media: on painted wood fabric flower in a geometric field. Signed and dated on the back. The artist says of himself: "It is the great love for art that pushed me to make concrete emotions and colourful visions that have always lived in my lively imagination. Suggestions that derive from various pictorial influences that I have revisited in a personal interpretation".

Summer Valley

Oil painting on canvas. Signed lower left. On the back there is a further signature with the title of the work. Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Meeting Art auction house in Vercelli. Painter from the province of Novara, Severino Ferraris was a landscape painter who painted the Ossola valleys with lively and luminous colours, the splendor of their snows, the romantic succession of farmhouses and soaring bell towers, all the warmth of autumns or the sigh of springs returning to awaken, with a painting full of purity and naivety. The work is presented in a frame.

The Organ-Grinder

Oil painting on canvas. Signed lower right. Trace of a date, not readable. The Cuneo artist Ottavio Steffanini had a life in constant movement, divided between Italy, Europe, America (in particular Venezuela). A restless and unpredictable artist, he concentrated his painting above all on female figures, portrayed with placid sensuality and an opulence influenced by the Spanish masters with whom he studied. But in his production there is no shortage of other subjects, united by an incessant exaltation of life, of nature. Here, however, a male figure is proposed, a half-length portrait of an accordion player, dignified and proud in his pose and gaze. The work is presented in a period frame.

Thistle Flowers 1958

Oil painting on canvas. Signed lower left. On the back there is a label from the Galleria Annunciata in Milan, with the title and date of the work. Fiorenzo Tomea created, especially in the 1950s, a vast production of flowers, in pots or alone: ​​in the same years this subject was a traditional theme of the painting of De Pisis and Mafai, and he wanted to propose a reflection on vanitas, that is, on fleeting nature of life. The dried, gaunt flowers, isolated from each other, suspended in a livid, almost surreal atmosphere, convey a sense of defeat and estrangement. The work is presented in a period frame.

Winter scene

Oil painting on canvas. Italian school of the early 1900s. The large scene is set in a desolate landscape completely covered in snow: on the left in the foreground, behind a group of carts and mobile homes (probably a gypsy camp) a woman cries while peeking out from behind a cloth; observe the figures moving away from the center of the scene, only silhouettes but clearly definable: two gendarmes flank a man in plain clothes, evidently under arrest. A street lamp and some dry and bare trees occupy the space on the right. The whole scene, painted with broad brushstrokes and without contours, is dominated by the greyish-white shades of the snow, the gray sky, the indistinct peaks in the background, or rather all the naturalistic elements, including one of the two horses tied to rest, while the other elements, the figures, the house, the street lamps, the other horse, and also the footprints on the snow that trace the path of the three figures in the distance, are characterized by brown and ocher colours, rather dull: the whole underlines the drama of the scene, perhaps also the desperation and sense of loneliness and abandonment of the woman. Restored and relined, the painting is not signed on the front (possible signature on the back covered by the relining?). The painting is presented in a period frame.

Glimpse of the Cloister of the Dome of Monreale

Mixed technique, with canvas, wooden panels, metal threads, small beads, etc. At the bottom center is the artist's name, unidentified. It is a three-dimensional and perspective reconstruction of the cloister of the Monreale Cathedral, with the fountain in the foreground. The work is presented in a display case with a gilded frame from the early 1900s.

Mountain Landscape

Oil painting on canvas. Signed lower left. Riccardo Viriglio, a landscape painter from Pavia, portrayed urban views mainly of his city and landscape views especially of Lombardy. A mountain landscape is presented here, a glimpse of a wide valley with a hut and pastoral figures, under peaks that lead back to the Alps. The work is presented in corniccoeva, from the mid-20th century.

Composition on 4 Panels, 1978

Mixed media on canvas applied to wooden panels, showing a sequence. On the lower right the artist's initials GB and the numbering of the panels; on the verso of each panel is the signature in full, with the date and the following sequential titles: 'By Bosch', 'Declination of an Owl', 'Transcription' and 'Disappearance for Coquetry'. Gabriella Benedini has defined her as an artist as 'a nomad in search of the profound meaning of things'. Although attracted and interested first by abstract-informal painting, then by Existential Realism and then by the New Figuration, Gabriella Benedini proceeds on a strictly personal quest that cannot be assimilated into any specific current. The entire 1970s were mainly marked by pictorial works that reflected literary cues filtered through her need for growth and confrontation. Then, through her passion for Alchemy, Benedini began to transform anything that came her way into works of art; shells, pages of old books, bottles, everything is combined into a harmonious whole that recalls spaces. Her works therefore become mainly three-dimensional, either to hang on the wall, or they are sculptures, even large ones. The four panels are presented here in a single frame.