Art is not a secret for a few. In the images of a student of the Accademia Albertina in Turin, the most important works of art in history reflect our contemporary everyday life. The artist has chosen to work under the pseudonym of Michi Galli: who I represent is “a virtual ghost that allows me to move with ease in a rather risky territory. Furthermore, by hiding my true identity, what is considered the fourth dimension of art is nourished, capable of making everything more interesting, fascinating and magnetic: the mystery”.
At the attempt to revive art in the project based on a series of photomontages entitled Artorin and who at the moment only lives on Facebook and Instagram because social networks are the best way to reach as many people as possible, Michi Galli connected the social complaint: "The first image was published on February 2, 2018, although the works had already started few months to allow me to accumulate a large amount of material to propose. The project was therefore born at the beginning of 2018, but its seeds had already been circulating for some years, when the idea of merging past, present and social denunciation was more concrete than ever, all against a backdrop of wonderful urban views that are too often forgotten" , said the artist.
If you scroll through the social pages where Michi Galli is active, you can see the lovers of Rene Francois Ghislain Magritte in a cinema, the passionate kiss of Francesco Hayez in front of a departing train, the barmaid of Edouard Manet at work in a fast food restaurant, Ophelia's John Everett Millais in a stream full of plastic waste. The inspiration for Michi Galli came from Cartoorin a social project by Marianna Boiano where photographs of an unusual Turin animated by Disney characters are published.
In his ironic and often surrealist works of denunciation, Michi Galli wants to allow those who come into contact with his images to go beyond the definitions of art: "My goal is to bring art into the contemporary world because it is alive and find among us, it does not belong to the past but to the present. Instead, what I want is to make people reflect on the fact that contemporary art has always been present: Michelangelo was a contemporary for his contemporaries, and let's think of Caravaggio, revered today but rejected by his contemporaries. Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionist. Art has always been contemporary: even Van Gogh, extremely fashionable today, was not liked at the time”.
The project will be one year old in a few months and the artist's hopes of seeing him continue to grow met the curiosity and interest of the public who shared the images, circulated them online, appreciated them and made them go viral: "I'm carrying on the project by enriching more and more the kaleidoscope of images that I propose – says Michi Galli – the idea would be to propose an exhibition, but for now the project continues, I still have many images ready and I hope to make some of them go viral, probably the ones that are more significant only for Turin but also at a national level, because they fully represent some conditions of our society".
Personally speaking, the author's favorite work is Millais' Ophelia: “my absolute favourite, both in terms of composition and meaning. My dream would be to make it a symbol for the fight against pollution. We live with rubbish under the doormat and we still haven't decided to change course towards a more sustainable future. At this rate we will end up like Ophelia”.
