The artist

Biography

Eugenio Galli was born in Seregno, in the province of Monza and Brianza, where he still works.

Ever since he was a teenager, he has harboured a passion for painting.
After studying science at high school in Monza, he spent the next 20 years or so working in his family’s goldsmith’s store and became an expert in gemmology. During this time he would also visit the studio of Gianni Arde. With him, Galli began an intense period of training and collaboration, through which he obtained his own personal interpretation of colour and scenery.

After leaving his interest in figurative art behind, at the beginning of the 1990s he pondered the issue of light, establishing a creative space highlighted by soft, delicate use of colour. And so his abstract cycles of work began, under the names substance and spirit, universal perceptions and chromatic iridescence. More recently, his output has embraced a philosophical quest for spiritual universality, under the name “The transcendence of Eugenio Galli”. Included within this new pictorial and sculptural approach are his elegy to white, his multi-material works and his sculptures made from various materials, especially COR-TEN steel.

Eugenio Galli has taken part in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad between Florence, Rome, Milan, Lugano, Lyon, Berlin, Budapest, Sharjah (United Arab Emirates) and Cairo.

His works can be found in private and public collections in Italy and across the globe.

My Decalogue

  • Art is an inseparable part of the spiritual universe
  • Artists have the right and the duty to engage in qualitative communication, regardless of the form and techniques used
  • The search for new materials for its own sake is not Art
  • Techniques must be subservient to the “message”
  • A work must show a reasonable degree of durability over time
  • The value of a work is shown by its ability to have an ongoing emotional impact over time
  • The artistic value of a work is not determined by its commercial value

  • A work absolutely cannot and must not be explained
  • A critic’s role is to present artists’ journeys and points of view, stimulate them and bear witness to their integrity
  • The work and the onlooker are the protagonists

THE TRANSCENDENCE

…this is Transcendence, or “going beyond”…it means going beyond the reality of the physical universe, thought and reason.

 

This pictorial and sculptural line is not inspired by tangible elements, images or elaborative contemplation. Instead, an individual as a spiritual being produces creative output, free of all “contamination”.

 

While he must use his body and handle different implements and materials in order to do this, he does so without thinking, but simply using the technique that he has acquired in a form of automatism. However, the consciousness of being means that nothing is done by chance.

REVIEWS

  • 2000, March

    ...Eugenio Galli remains in very delicate contact with reality. But he takes a different path: to express himself he creates his own sovereign vocabulary. We can therefore find here abstract “invented” paintings, which while playing with form and color, are used to evoke a thrill of beauty in anyone who attentively observes his work...

    György Szabó

  • 2009, January

    Galli is a sophisticated lover of beauty who communicates with his own spirit (and with our soul) in search of new expressive forms. In his pieces which are composed of delicately soft tones, light plays a primary role; it is an existential light which is able to pierce the canvas (like the ‘slashes’ of artist Lucio Fontana), going beyond the image to capture the spirit of its observer.

    Chiara Cinelli

  • 2009, January

    His use of the color white is where we begin our journey. It is in fact here where the Artist discovers the freedom to authentically experience anticipation, like the soul’s state of protension towards the Absolute. Tension is “released” in an ultimate piercing gesture which, ripping through the white canvas with color, opens a door to other possible worlds, worlds of imagination and dreams. The complete and material whiteness of Galli’s Steles take us even further. It is here, at the peak of our anticipation, where these possible make-believe worlds layer upon each other and blend together, finding a sublime sense of peace.

    Francesca Bianucci

  • 2009, May

    With his paintings, Eugenio Galli brings out the color white against bursts of color created with impromptu chromatic lacerations which splinter his canvas, almost cutting right through the middle of it, as if this flickering of color were devouring the light which spreads knowledge throughout the world. …Galli’s work is a passionate pursuit to capture this worldly knowledge – knowledge of an incommensurable world where the ego navigates by sight and searches for a leading thread, something to hold onto “so as not to fall into the sky” as poet Giovanni Pascoli once wrote. Galli has also come back to the extremely diverse, complex and ideological accumulation of this past century, to study for himself the small constitution of the universe: The constitution of light.

    Vittorio Sutto

  • 2011, August

    Eugenio Galli is an innovative artist who conveys a number of contemporary concerns in striking works with a clear spiritual intent. As part of his evocative personal journey, an encounter with the Salento area and one of its most charismatic figures helped to produce some extremely interesting artistic output. The "2011 Turris Magna Award" that he received offers proof that no location is off-limits to those who are at home with art and spirituality.

    Hervé A. Cavallera

  • 2011, July

    ...What’s more, being a person who is fully aware of having reached his goal, Galli provides us with absolutely magnificent paintings, loaded with a resonance of colour and light, which can serve as a sort of inspiring suggestion, originating from an extreme undressing of a language which can be likened to spiritual distance. He gauges himself as the highest point of an absoluteness which is focused on defining an evocative colour, a crescendo of symbols and script, an appearance or a new composition of figures which by now are far from what is imaginable, his very own code which is poised between pure abstraction and the permanence of traces which, if they are not figurative, they without doubt appear to be emotive. His paintings are teeming with turmoil and lacking in grace, a quasi-state of eternity, the opportunity to create time and space which seize an internal rhythm of sweet natural echoes, although they may be addicted to meditating over the poetics of his gestures. A new landscape slowly takes shape, a new panorama composed of molecular charm, substance, dust and ash, as if it were an integral recovery of what we have experienced. However his painting undoubtedly remains the main attraction, motivated by a pursuit which, having started with a subjectiveness in crisis, then goes on to conquer a linguistic and morphological objectiveness, the heritage and characteristics of a truly Lombard tradition.

    Carlo Franza