Gabriele Grones “Conversazioni”

The exhibition features a series of small oil paintings on canvas, revolving around the symbolism of the thistle. The thistle is a subject found in various artistic traditions, from medieval tapestries to Japanese prints. It is an infrequent symbolic element with an unstable meaning, which the artist is interested in investigating through the iconographic variants to be found in his everyday experience, often finding it in mountain meadows, along roadsides or in city parks.
The title of the paintings is Marginalia: a Latin term that refers to a scholars’ notes in the page margins which served to explain certain passages and thus make the text more clearly comprehensible. In his research, Gabriele Grones often cites Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images or Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: an unfinished and experimental work that draws iconographic paths through the history of art. This is the case of the paintings displayed on this occasion: some of the thistles are taken from life in nature, while others are details taken from works of art.