Apr 12, 2025 - May 04, 2025Via Lepanto, 1, Gallipoli, Lecce,https://www.lacasadegliartisti.it
Italy
Author: Max Hamlet Sauvage
Title: “The Hybrid Metropolitan Universe that investigates the destiny of Man”
Location: “La Casa degli Artisti”, Via Lepanto, 1, Gallipoli (LE)
Exhibition Period: from April 12 to May 4, 2025
Inauguration: Saturday, April 12, 2025 at 6:30 pm
Opening hours: every day from 4 to 8 pm
Admission: free of charge
Curators: Prof. Orsolina Fontò and Maria Cristina Maritati
Art director: Giorgio De Cesario
Catalog available on site
The cultural meetings of La Casa degli Artisti in Gallipoli, residence of the artist Giorgio De Cesario, continue in the month of April, which this time hosts in its Permanent Gallery his friend and esteemed colleague Max Hamlet Sauvage, a multifaceted conceptual surrealist of international fame, originally from Gallipoli but with a cosmopolitan education. In fact, he traveled extensively around the world, attending the most prestigious art schools and meeting the most prominent artists and critics of the twentieth century and the new millennium.
The exhibition, presented by the well-known writer Maurizio Nocera and consisting of 25 works, is entitled “The Hybrid Metropolitan Universe that investigates the destiny of Man”: a long title but one that summarizes the artist’s personal message in a few significant words. The works on display are a narrative sequence in which one can recognize the themes dear to Max Hamlet Sauvage: low-cut female figures that offer themselves to male hybrids in which the bird or animal heads suggest the “animality” that hides behind the harmonious elegance.
In this regard, art historian Enrico Crispolti commented: “It is an explicitly perverse world, treated with irony, satire and sarcasm, and with the fun of a scathing spirit that condemns those who commodify the female image and has always denounced the individual and collective sexual neuroses that today have become gossip and political news”. His works also show a criticism of opulent Western society that is combined with a modern fairy tale represented, in the manner of Max Ernst, "by birds that live bourgeois and that share erotic needs and desires with the upper middle class (Giorgio Di Genova, art critic and historian). Max Hamlet also questions what the destiny of man could be, considering the irreversible degradation of human consciousness, the power of multinationals, the growing oppression of some states over others. He therefore questions all this and Maurizio Nocera concludes: "His truly seems like a zoo of human figures that, in the face of the collapse of humanity's consciousness and the violence of power, give hope for a tomorrow of orgasmic joy and liberating trance". It is no coincidence that the illustrious Philippe Daverio, speaking of Max Hamlet, defined him as a "goad man" who questions consciences with uncomfortable metaphors of social denunciation but full of the pathos of an ironic and mocking genius loci.
All this is narrated in the works included in this exhibition that boasts the care of Professors Orsolina Fontò and Maria Cristina Maritati and the collaboration of CittadinanzAttiva, Gallipoli assembly, and the Circolo “La Fenice”.
Maria Cristina Maritati