More info about the exhibition
On the 16th of November 2007 galerie davide gallo is pleased to announce the group show "Speculum Mundi" which includes artists from the new generation of the Asian scene, India, Pakistan and Japan.

The young Indian artist Basist Kumar, born in Delhi in 1984 and currently a student at BARODA University, faces in his artistic research the issues of identity, relationships between identities and development of identity in contemporary world. In the first series of works the artist is relating to celebrities of the culture of our time: Ravi Shankar, Nijinsky, etc. These characters become symbols of an entire world; beyond representing themselves they represent the culture of which they are ambassadors in. In the last production the artist neglects famous names in favour of anonymous men and women which are apparently with no clear identity. This condition of neutrality means that they are ambassadors of a human dimension beyond time, space and geography.

Reeta Saeed reflects her own world through Hindu mythology and the pagan universe of men and Gods compeeting among themselves, victims of passions that accompany the course of life from the day when Krishna, "the manufacturer", proclaimed the origin of the world, and the day when Krishna "the destroyer" will proclaim its end. Sometimes daily life enters into the work of Reeta Saeed as a snake which creeps in a prohibited garden; behind the appareance of heroes and gods they conceal facts from the chronicle, and the myth reveals its reality. It is the myth of Krishna in his dual capacity as a builder and destroyer, to be the subject of the latest work by Reeta Saeed. The myth has no narrative function; for the Pakistani artist it is a warning to society of our time.

For the Japanese artist Sai Hashizume art has a metaphysical value playing a sensual game, provocativeness which induces the viewer to reflect with irony on the contemporary world. The mirror of the world for Sai Hashizume is a possibility of extreme openness, a daydream in which everything is possible: a fabric assumes life, a body expresses its eros in nudity, objects come alive and persue each other. What remains in the paintings of Sai Hashizume is a poetic atmosphere, a tone of rarefied melancholy, a desire to reveal the world with a secret of a -questionably- lost harmony, the secret of a game closer to a dream than to reality.

In the work of Toru Kuwakubo the Speculum Mundi is an analytical investigation of symbols of the contemporary world. The abandoned beaches, the absolute places are geographies where past and present are melting with each other to tell in a detailed way the identity and the essential condition of contemporary man. The Japanese artist mixes in a complete new narrative way the elements of psychoanalytical culture with them of Oriental spirituality. In fact, in the last production of works, Kuwakubo's beaches are crowded with objects of daily life, votive candles, clothes, small images of divinities.

Davide Gallo

www.galeriedavidegallo.com