Honey in the coffee

I recently had a lucky opportunity to visit Ellen Gallagher's exhibition AxME at the Tate Modern in London, before its ending. It is a great show, the very first major retrospective in the UK of this American artist, displayed through eleven rooms. The title, AxME is referring to they way black native American were pronouncing 'ask me' and also to the 'Acme Corporation' a fictional company featuring in the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon.  Her artistic world is soaked in an American culture but experienced through a personal family perspective and origin. Being of a biracial ethnicity (the father was born in US but his family was from Cape Verde and her mother was Irish), her imagery goes from wigs advertisement in vintage African American magazines and African diaspora to oceanography, science fictions and writings of Gertrude Stein (American writer and poet). I saw Callagher's work for the first time in Santiago de Compostela at the opening sh...

On Thursday 26th of April, we inaugurated the first solo exhibition in London of Rome based artist Massimo Nota @ Art Lobby, curated by Alessandra Migani. The show received a warm welcome despite the persistent rain and a grey sky. I am publishing here my piece of writing on the show and images of the artist's work. Massimo Nota's exhibition poster These black sounds are the mystery, the roots that probe through the mire that we all know of, and do not understand, but which furnishes us with whatever is sustaining in art. Black sounds: so said the celebrated Spaniard, thereby concurring with Goethe, who, in effect, defined the duende when he said, speaking of Paganini: "A mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain." Federico García Lorca , The Theory and Function of Duende Massimo Nota, originally from Rome, is a prolific artist/illustrator whose world is imbued with visions. Nota’s creative act reveals an instincti...