In collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, the National Italian American Foundation, and COM.IT.ES, and under the auspices of The Consulate General of Italy in Los Angeles, the Downtown Art Center (DAC) Gallery held the closing reception for Mario Canali: New Works, on Art Walk, July 11th.
Mario Canali is a visionary. His representations deepen explorations into the complexity, beauty and discrepancy of the contemporary human being. His goal in painting is to incorporate an emotional dimension to the spatial dimensions; it is emotion that shapes his human hybrids, their uncommon behaviors, and the evocative landscapes in which they exist.
There are no random elements in Canali’s work; the spatial dimension seems to drive his paintings to an extreme precision, immediacy and strength.
Mario Canali has a passion for life. His representations are drawn not only from life experiences, personal encounters, situations and events, but also from the study of human beings. It is these very explorations that led him to create interactive installations capable of sensing psychophysical parameters, which have been experienced by thousands of people from all walks of life around the world.
For Mario Canali, painting after the digital experience can be seen as media (software + hardware) to efficiently represent realistic simulations of imaginary worlds. Los Angeles’ unique history and landscape became the ideal setting for Canali’s new vision.
The exhibition will feature oil paintings on canvas and panel, as well as drawings on panel.
Born in Monza, Milan, Italy, Mario Canali began his artistic career in 1975, devoting the first ten years to painting. Shortly thereafter, he turned his attention to electronic and digital art and is considered a pioneer in the field. Second to John Lasseter at Ars Electronica in Linz for two consecutive years, and winner of numerous awards at the national level (Nastro d’Argento, Rome) as well as internationally (Imagina, Monte Carlo) in the field of computer graphics and 3D animation, Mario Canali pioneered immersive virtual reality (Satori, 1992) and interactive installations, using body parameters to probe people’s emotional states. In October 2012, he developed and published the iPad application “Hungry&FoolishScribbleTest”, a personality test capable of gauging how Hungry and Foolish you are.
Canali’s studies and research in the fields of digital media, new paradigms of science, psychology and neurology earned him teaching credentials at Accademia di Brera in Milan for “Virtual Reality and Paradigms of Complexity”, and at NABA Academy of Arts and Design in Milan for “Emotional Scenes and Cognitive Environments”.
DAC Gallery is located at 828 S Main St., Los Angeles, CA 90014. Opening hours: Mon-Fri 8:00 am to 3:30 pm, or by appt. For more info visit http://www.dacgallery.com.
