Over the course of 2021, I have exhibited some of my artworks at a very unusual art gallery based in Milan, Italy.
MADS Milano Contemporary Art Gallery is an online art gallery. They display art on large visual touch screens rather than original canvases. They also present their shows online to a global audience and are a place where art lovers can buy art online.
This review is of two of my works, "Desert Ice" and "Intimacy". These paintings were exhibited in the “Paraiso” show. I received great feedback from the exhibition, and I’d like to share with you a video made by the one of the show’s art curators, Francesca Brunello.
But first, here is "Desert Ice", one of the artworks exhibited and reviewed:
This painting is exhibited on this site here.
Here is the curactor's review video. Scroll down to read her review and comments about these works.
Curator comments
“The art by Ade Blakey, a contemporary Australian artist, immediately appears as a visual synthesis of subtle details surrounded by colour fields, sometimes uniform, others more convulsive.
His research is characterized by a thrust towards an abstract language, in order to provoke a series of questions in the observer, leading him to an in-depth analysis of the painting.
The canvas becomes a place on which to condense powerful meanings, where the careful arrangement of colours and shapes is not merely an unconscious expression, but a careful and studied reflection between past, present and future.
In “Desert Ice”, sinuous lines move through space, accompanying the gaze inside the work and guiding the observer in the search for a meaning. The three fields of colour in which this painting is divided become like chapters in a book to be read in order to grasp the hidden message.
The colours used are reminiscent of nature: blues, azures, browns, reds and yellows are the basis on which to build a true allegory, a communicating world full of symbols to be revealed to our knowledge.
Ade Blakey tells us about the world and the difficulties that man cyclically encounters. He tells us about an organized and complicated system that often overwhelms and traps its own creator.
This ice in the desert, which seems to immobilize the living creatures within it, is however destined to melt, watering the arid soil and sowing new seeds, which will grow and evolve, bearing new fruits.
The artist looks towards a better future of renewal and new ideas and reminds us that each of us can contribute to it. Like a demiurge, he accompanies us and shows us new visions, opening our perceptions towards a new future.
He tells us a profound message, symbolically appropriating the earthly elements and transforming the life cycle of the seed into a complex primordial representation.
In “Intimacy” we also find the same abstract language, here influenced by the cave paintings – created on the walls of the caves since the Paleolithic – characterized by an expressive minimalism that becomes fundamental to describe the concept contained in the artist’s painting.
Intimacy is analyzed through the sexual act, a moment that is in itself extremely profound and personal.
The description of details also takes on symbolic meanings, as in the case of the colour red, used here to describe the anthropomorphic figures inebriated in their primary instincts.
The blue lines, which move sinuously across the canvas, also accompany the observer into his own intimacy, awakening visceral memories in his mind. The movement and whirling in which this painting unfolds only intensifies the power of the act.
This work becomes a source of profound emotions and ancestral vibrations, taking man on another journey through time, to a distant past, made up of primordial instincts.
It takes him back into a cave, which becomes a place of recollection, a place where one can divest himself of the clothes worn by social convention, finding himself again, without masks and without judgement.
Art Curator Francesca Brunello”
