Jimmy Milani
“Jimmy Milani (Savigliano, 1995) creates paintings in which carefully considered, planned compositions of flat colour fields are achieved with a few clearly distinct colours. The works draw heavily on the world of comics, acid fairy tales, graphics and illustration, transferring everything onto a painterly plane kept independent through an uncommon ability to create powerful, magnetic images. It is as if Jimmy were able to combine the great tradition of Italian metaphysical painting with the world of the low-fi video games of the nineties.”
Jimmy Milani’s work is characterised by a continuous collision with the problems of design, where rationality and feeling clash in a constant oscillation between an objective design hypothesis and an intuitive sensibility. In dialogue with art history, the artist tries to move away from the nostalgic feeling that seems to pervade painting, thus both opposing and embracing the nature of the pictorial medium. Moving away from the mere idea of contemplation, the artist seeks an intersection between specific meaning and the analysis of surfaces, depths and colours, resulting in a tempered distortion of thought, whether real, spatial or dreamlike.
Narratives and iconic subjects try to blend together on a surface made up of curves, angles and edges without nuances. In the works presented in the exhibition, the paintings are inserted/set into shaped black forex panels; the message and the themes change from piece to piece, just like the different tracks of a music album or the different chapters of a collection of stories, but the way of reading them is similar for each work, since what holds them together, beyond the working method, is the artist himself: his way of elaborating an image, the colours he uses, his interests and his personal contrasts.
He graduated in Visual Arts and Painting from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, has worked for institutions and private galleries and has taken part in various residencies; he has exhibited in Italy since 2015.