ANNUNCIAZIONE (RAGAZZA CON TELESCOPIO) | OLMO GASPERINI

Annunciazione (ragazza con telescopio), along with five other oil paintings on canvas, represents the outcome of a residency attended by the artist Olmo Gasperini (Rome, 1997) at Casa degli Artisti in Milan. The themes explored range from the visible vs. invisible relationship to the exploration of the feeling of wonder evoked by common and everyday things, but which are nonetheless not trivial, such as the stars…
The protagonist of the painting is a woman dressed in a simple blue dress with straps and with long black hair falling freely down her back. The room she is in has a rustic style, with wooden furniture and a rug in the center of the floor. Through the open windows, a wonderful starry night can be glimpsed. On the table next to the windows rests a telescope, pointed upwards. The woman is seated on a chair, but her torso is turned backward, as if she has just been called by someone invisible to the viewer’s eyes.

When observing the six paintings together, one can notice how each is connected to the others, although created as individual pieces and not as part of a composition. Indeed, almost as if it were the subsequent still frame, in another painting, we can observe the same room depicted in Annunciazione (ragazza con telescopio) but without the presence of the woman. This time, the chair is empty, and a shooting star appears through the window.
The other artworks in the composition focus on specific objects – such as the chair, the window, or the shooting star – tracing a visual path similar to that of a matryoshka doll.

The poetic narrative impressed by Gasperini in this project is delicate and, at the same time, disarming, almost moving in the melancholy of an empty chair once occupied or of the shooting star, sometimes bright, other times absent.
Gasperini consciously handles the concept of seeing/not seeing: the visual path he proposes leads the viewer to feel as if trapped in a kind of temporal ‘pinball machine,’ despite the stylistic simplicity with which he characterizes his setting.

The residency attended by Gasperini, titled Visibile/Invisibile. Tecniche della Meraviglia, curated by Francesca Alfano Miglietti, took place from September to December 2023 at the ateliers of Casa degli Artisti, Milan.

Olmo Gasperini
Annunciazione (ragazza con telescopio), 2023
Oil on canvas, 220 x 170 cm
© Olmo Gasperini, courtesy the artist

Olmo Gasperini, Annunciazione (ragazza con telescopio), 2023, installation view.
Visibile/Invisibile. Tecniche della Meraviglia, 2023, Casa degli Artisti, Milano. © William Fernando Aparicio.

26/06/24