The eternal reverie

Secci Gallery is pleased to present the two-person exhibition The eternal reverie, with Radu Oreain and Giorgio de Chirico curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto. The show, staged in the gallery’s new exhibition spaces in Pietrasanta (Via G. Garibaldi 10) from June 3 to July 16, is the first project inaugurating the gallery’s summer venue.

These two artists, matched together for the first time ever, could appear as they were apart from each other.

However, while getting closer to the Romanian artist Radu Oreian’s practice, it clearly emerges how it is based on classicism and in the use of classical techniques such as traditional drawing and painting, as well as in the themes chosen, which are aimed to explore history, ancient myths and archives. Yet, his almost miniaturist classicism, with its small and precise details, is enriched thanks to the use of a new materiality and chromatic density.

Similarly, the Old Master Giorgio De Chirico, while starting from classical foundations and a traditional visual culture, creates a new language, proving to be among the most original and innovative of the last century.

Considered as the pioneer of Metaphysical painting, he expresses his aesthetic in an established figurativeness, yet with dreamy and unusual juxtapositions.

Pier Paolo Pancotto is the curator of the Art Club exhibition program at Villa Medici – French Academy in Rome.

Radu Oreian (Târnăveni, 1984) currently works and lives in France. In 2002 he obtained a degree from the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca and then continued his studies at the National University of Art in Bucharest where he graduated in 2007.

Radu Oreian has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions: 1969 Gallery, A sea of green and blue (New York, 2022), SVIT Gallery, Befriending the memory muscle (Prague, 2020, with Ciprian Mureşan), Gallery Nosco, Microsripts and Melted Matters (London, 2019), Gallery ISA, Farewell To The Thinker of Thoughts (Mumbai, 2018). His institutional projects include La Fondazione, Project Room (Rome, 2020, solo show), The Last Agora, Plan B Foundation (Cluj-Napoca, 2019), and Chasseur d’Images, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Paris, 2019). His group exhibitions include One in a million, Gallery Nosco (Marseille, 2018) and On The Sex of Angels, Nicodim Gallery (Bucharest, 2017).

Giorgio de Chirico (Volos, Greece, 1888 – Rome 1978), was one of the initiators and a leading exponent of the artistic current of metaphysical painting.

He was son of a railway engineer, at first he lived in Athens, where he studied at the local polytechnic institute, then, in 1905, moved with his mother and brother Andrea (Alberto Savinio) to Munich. The art of A. Böcklin and the philosophy of Nietzsche made a deep impression on him. He began to paint allegorical paintings and in 1910 made a trip to Florence. He then painted l’Enigma dell’oracolo and l’Enigma d’un pomeriggio d’autunno, the first works in which the symbolic possibilities of dreams are revealed, in which real objects are in unnatural and unusual relationships, cast within a suspended atmosphere. From 1911 to 1915 he was in Paris, where he frequented G. Apollinaire, M. Jacob, P. Picasso. His meeting with G. Apollinaire was the most revealing and clarifying. When he went back to Italy, where he served military service during war, he met C. Carrà, the initiator of “metaphysical” painting, aimed at creating fantastic suggestions with the juxtaposition of disparate objects, especially ancient statues in spaces constructed according to the rules of fifteenth-century perspective but lit up by colors with a decidedly modern timbre, in which astonishing associations of senses, ideas, history and time coexisted. In 1925 he returned briefly to Paris, at the dawn of Surrealism; but he had already turned, decorating various Roman villas, toward an openly romantic painting, abandoning the severe rigor of “metaphysical” painting. He then moved on to evoking classical motifs (horses by the sea, gladiators, etc.) and thus turned to an effectual realism of seventeenth-century inspiration. There were also numerous self-portraits, in which de Chirico represented himself through celebratory or deliberately ironic paintings. His love for metaphysical painting came to the fore again in his latest works, in which de Chirico confirmed his desire to reveal the mystery of existence through the fascination of his paintings. He was also a set designer, wrote a novel (Hebdomeros, 1930) and an autobiography (1945). In recent times he took a polemical stance against contemporary art. In 2008, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of his death, the Galleria d’arte moderna in Rome dedicated an extensive retrospective to the artist, in which the roots of his passion for ancient painting were analyzed; in parallel, in the exhibition Eccellenza italiana. Arte, moda e gusto nelle icone della pubblicità held at the Mazzucchelli Museums in Brescia, sketches and posters made by de Chirico for some advertising campaigns were exhibited.