We are very happy to participate this year in Milan Drawing Week organized by Collezione Ramo and curated by Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, which opens on Saturday, 25 November starting at 12:00 noon.

For the duration of Drawing Week we will be hosted by Galleria Ciaccia Levi, via Gioacchino Rossini, 3 where we will present a body of work created specifically for this exhibition by Luca Gioacchino Di Bernardo (Naples, 1991) in dialogue with a work by Gianfranco Baruchello from the Ramo Collection.

Luca Gioacchino Di Bernardo's research is expressed primarily through drawing: in it the ancient legacy of shamanic cave paintings and the icy mechanics of the instruction booklets we use to assemble our furniture coexist specularly.

In his work, therefore, both a deep need to exorcise the present and the need to have to investigate and reflect on the past merge, mixing different levels of experience and reading.

Invited by Irina Zucca Alessandrelli to participate in Drawing Week, Di Bernardo chose among Gianfranco Baruchello's works a small paper (graphite and watercolor) from 1974, titled "Skizo corpus philosophica", which describes the apple tree, some of which the artist grew on his estate called Agricola Cornelia.

Interested in the biblical reference evoked by the subject, Di Bernardo decides to deal with this work in the wake of a study on the commonality between wood and human matter that he has been developing for some time and which had a sort of epilogue in his solo show dedicated to the Expulsion from Eden at the Galleria Tiziana Di Caro.

Representative of this path is "Kundalini Tellurico", a large paper depicting a tree that the artist decided to include in this project as a point of connection between the production developed up to 2022 and that following the encounter with Baruchello's work .

In the paper of 1974 we find the section of the tree with fruits and leaves also dissected.

Di Bernardo took his cue from the individual parts described in Baruchello's work to draw them again in turn, but enlarged, as if someone were analyzing them under a microscope. Di Bernardo's interest is not to be framed in a scientific or biological dimension, but rather in a theological one, which pertains to the divine of nature.

A group of drawings made through graphite on paper is accompanied by a series of collages, in which the figure and drawing are accompanied by writing.

Di Bernardo creates "anatomical maps" in which he describes what takes place in the sections of various woods whose shapes show an assonance with the parts of the human body.

Here again the artist is not interested in a simple formal comparison: his are not real human organs, rather we can speak of emotional, cultural, political and existential organs.

Once again Di Bernardo confuses the viewer by offering minute details that are treated with severe formal elegance, with an abundance of detail and just as much visual noise, due to the jumbling of the stroke that complicates until it becomes chaos.

The upward tension unites the tree and the human figure just as the fruit symbolically equals the restless awareness of the Fall: these similarities recur in the work of Luca Gioacchino di Bernardo who describes art as an open source whose meaning is inevitably given by the viewer.

In this case the artist says: I am in the business of expertise, of creating a medium so complex that it can allow for reference despite what I want to say. This is, for me, working with symbols.

From Saturday, 25 November to Sunday, 3 December 2023, Milan's Ramo Collection presents the third edition of Milano Drawing Week, an annual event under the patronage and collaboration of the Milan City Council's Department of Culture, which involves the entire city in a focused lunge on drawing and takes shape in a constellation of exhibitions spread throughout the Milanese territory: a twelve-stage journey through the city, among contemporary artists and masters of the 20th century.

For the occasion, the Ramo Collection is making available to a circuit of Milanese galleries and institutions a selection of works on paper by 20th-century Italian artists. The invitation, addressed to one artist per space, is to identify a work from the collection and place it in dialogue with their own research.

With the third edition of Milano Drawing Week, the Ramo Collection reconfirms its connection with the city, which becomes fertile ground for new reflections related to the artistic practice of drawing and becomes a crossroads of different exhibition programs and institutions.