Studiolo is pleased to present the first solo show by the artist Gianni Di Rosa (Modica, 1984); suspended in a conceptual space between past and present, the exhibition “The day of triumph is a black hole” is a journey through austere and elegiac images, a personal translation of an eternal return to places, people, unrealized dreams and narrated events.

The 2014 World Cup final between Germany and Argentina is the incipit of the project, an event in which the German player Christopher Kramer, clashing against an opponent, reports such a violent trauma that he loses the memory of that legendary moment in which he will become, without his knowledge, the World Champion. Di Rosa operates a conceptual translation, placing the player's portrait - in the form of a selfportrait - in a relationship of interdependence with an iconographic fetish: a synthetic lawn, as an ineluctable memory incubator. What emerges is the will to start from a void; the "player-artist" runs into the inner territory of memory and declares the need to transcribe this detachment in a opera.

An absence from which other pictorial notes branch out: chronicles of childhood, stories and desires, as asphyxiated promises of a future that has been never manifested. The author's autobiography corrupts every work bringing into it particles of life lived or just his own somatic citations: this is the case of his past as a former footballer from which the interest in hybrid faces of diptych “Gemelli D”, clearly referring to the Mayan culture of "Pelota", or replacing his own face with that of the famous anti-regime footballer Matthias Sindelar (also known as Cartavelina) or even in the work “1984”, a reference to the famous novel by George Orwell but also his date of birth.

Each character outlined highlights the desire to create a dichotomy between the real objectivity of the present and the melancholy renunciation of a past aspiration; the physical soul and the mental soul of the painted characters intersect without ever coinciding, a process that the artist often puts into practice by means of a pictorial "de-phasing" suggesting that memory rests like an aura on the true. In this world suspended between yesterday and today, between thought and experience, mental connections manifest themselves on the thread of memory, materialize, showing accurate traces of a broken reality. Gianni Di Rosa thinks of an exhibition where he is playing an ideal football match or with life.