The challenge posed by Gianluigi Colin’s art is not that of returning to the ancient past, nor undertaking an anachronistic adventure. Rather, it rediscovers distant survivals. It tracks down traces of the Classical woven into the present: it aims to see what the Greek gods have become in our own disillusioned era. Colin uses myth as a means not to escape “this” world, but rather to inhabit it in a different way, taking side roads.
Looking at “our” Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Venus, he doesn’t suggest we turn away from the present day. Committed to maintaining a dialogue with the contemporary, Colin listens to “speaking oracles,” creating inexact, imperfect, ungrammatical frescoes of sorts based on a complex technique: first, he browses through the newspapers; then, he takes pages with “revealing” images; he then crumples them, with a gesture of intolerance; he then photographs these “crumples,” prints the file on newsprint, and mounts it on a support of laminated newspapers; finally, he forcefully reworks the material with his hands, bending it further.
Thus Gianluigi Colin’s Mitografie (Mythographies), realized between 2009 and 2011, are born-like crinkled fabrics, shipwrecks, and relics of frayed, distant memories now long gone.