Artists Represented

23. Agamemnon-The Return, Oil on Canvas, $2.267 After Agamemnon heads off to Troy, his wife Clytemnestra, spurred on by her resentment of Agamemnon for sacrificing his daughter to Artemis in exchange for favorable winds for his ships, initiates an affair with Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s cousin. Together they plot to Kill Agamemnon after his return from war at Troy. On his return from Troy Clytemnestra devises a plan to murder Agamemnon. She sews the ends of the sleeves and collar of Agamemnon’s night shirt and while he is getting ready for bed, she stabs him to death, thus avenging the death of her daughter at the hands of her husband’s ambition.

8. A hero's Journey, 153x137cm Price: $8,950 The ‘Hero’s Journey’ is the journey that all heroes must make on the road to self-realization. It is a recurring theme throughout myth and religion. It involves intentionally exposing oneself to, and overcoming, personal challenges and dangers and even death itself. The Hero’s journey takes place against an uncharted and unfamiliar ‘landscape’, sometimes physical, and sometimes psychological, where things are not always what they seem to be.

The city of Melbourne is my Muse. Melbourne is also my adoptive city. I came to Australia in 1964 from Chioggia, Venice, Italy. I started my Architectural studies at R.M.I.T. I graduated in Architecture in 1975 and registered as an Architect in 1976. Melbourne changed a lot since the late seventies. The transformation of the city in the last two decades is beyond what anyone could have ever imagined. I now look at Melbourne from an artist’s perspective: How buildings impact on their immediate surroundings and on the city itself and how the old and the new stand side by side. Do they change the historical character of the street? Does the human get lost in this new environment? Etc, etc. I think my paintings will speak for themselves and the viewers will see them from their own personal perspectives. That’s the beauty of Art.

Antonio Balletta works in a variety of media, large graphite drawings, oil painting s and bronze sculpture. His images are skillfully rendered, elaborately staged works that use quiet drama, subtle expression as well as visceral symbolism as a conduit for both personal and universal narratives. By emphasizing aesthetics, he wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator, he creates compositions or settings that generate poetic images which ;balance on the edge of recognition and the subconscious. The images are an invitation into a story. Much of the symbolism derives from a synthesis of personal experience. Over the years he has developed a vocabulary of potent signs, each one iconic in its connection with humanity. Flowers, branches, boats, nests, kangaroos and other curious creatures populate his work. While his symbols imply tangible things he urges us to interpret them through our own experiences and mixed bag of memories. A branch may represent life’s forked and tenuous path yet it may also evoke metaphors for growth and energy, while the flowers can be read as repositories for feminine power, fertility and life’s transient beauty. The man in so many of his images represents himself, his sons and every man. His works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, allegories merge, meanings shift and the present fuses. Balletta's art inveigles us into its world through optimism for life journey. It makes us want to enter into the artists dialogue and decipher its allegorical tales. &

Antonio Muratore

6. Apollo, Oil on Canvas , 152x137cm Price: $8,950 Apollo, son of Zeus and Leto and brother of Artemis the moon goddess, also referred to as Helios, was the Greek God of the Sun, Archery , Music , Dance, and Truth. She hunted in the wood under the silvery light of the moon.

7. Artemis, Oil on canvas, 153x 137cm, Price: $8,950 Artemis, daughter of Zeus and Leto and twin sister to Apollo was the Goddess of the Moon, Archery and Hunting. She ruled the night as her brother ruled the day.

I am interested in the uniqueness of interpreted reality where the human form or the environment is the context and the catalyst for response. I choose to use, interpret and manipulate the human form as subject matter because I want to acknowledge that the Human Form is fundamental in art, and that abstraction is meaningless without an implied Human Form. I find that abstraction, perspective, distortion etc, fail when they do not act as devices for reaching an expressive climax and I understand that abstraction cannot be an end in itself because it cannot exist out of a defined context. My art's practice is concerned with interpreting and distilling figurationinto a succinct narrative to express a sense of actuality, intimacy and immediacyof beliefs and emotions.

18.Calypso& Odysseus, Oil on Canvas, 137X100cm, Price: $7,750 On his way home from the Trojan war, Odysseus is stranded on the Island of Ogygia, the home of beautiful Calypso, daughter of the Titan, Atlas. Calypso falls in love with Odysseus and detains him for 7 years in an attempt to make him fall in love with her. Odysseus however, notwithstanding Calypso’s promises to make him immortal, yearns to return to his wife Penelope back in Ithaca. Calypso eventually relents and lets him go.

Artist Statement- ‘Beatitude’ is a collection of my latest body of paintings, bringing together several themes I have previously explored in my work over the years. Before I began to put energy toward this exhibition, I had no specific aim or established direction. My only aim was to loosen up and return to early times of being fearless and adventurous. I had only one strict rule...that I would not care about the image so much and that it flowed from my brushes and pallet knives. The works came together on their own from this. The objects I chose to paint and draw were all intrinsically intertwined in my mind, meaning that they are all connected somehow in my understanding and appreciation of them. They overlapped and swam around in my thoughts for years. They are things that bring me wonder and joy. Quite by accident three clear themes emerged from the body of work. The first theme to emerge is my love of the natural world, being the living plants on earth. Nature is utterly wonderful. I have an affinity for nature's colours, patterns, and organic flowing lines. I love the asymmetry. Each element is a complex and a perfect mathematical algorithm. As with most subjects I draw and paint, I cannot help but zoom in and magnify them. I am instinctively drawn in close to my subject. I crop objects tightly, looking for an intimate understanding of line and form. I don't have any interest in painting rolling hills or sweeping clouds. For me, zooming out would miss so much of the "good stuff". I can't help but focus in on one part of an object and tend to draw things quite large. I want to get as close to the action as possible. I fix my eyes firmly and it's as though I am relying on the sensation of touch, even though it's really only my eyes that are seeing. I try to stay honest in my work and have the courage to make honest mistakes. I draw lines that may be incorrect, which I then redraw and rub away. I also try to capture the splendour, the colours, the light etc. elements that give me joy. I try to share them with the viewer. The second theme that emerged is the gift of fruit. Without thinking too much about it I am always in awe of this miracle. It gravitates around fertility, sustenance, and goodness. The fruits of the earth are amazing and plentiful. It breaks my heart to think that these fruits are not evenly distributed. For me, the cycle of life on earth (as opposed to surrounding dead planets) is mind blowing. "Ancient Fruit" (sketch of a pomegranate) is an ode to this millennia old cycle as well as a subtle reference to knowledge, consciousness, rebirth and original sin. Lemons and limes are everyday fruit but equally worthy of being painted as divine objects. I have placed them front and center as such. The third theme to emerge in these works is my ongoing affinity to the humble vessel. These simple lines depicting a container or bowl have many deep undertones for me. The vessel represents an object that contains things, be it water, fruit, food etc... These images can be perceived by the viewer as empty or ready to hold the harvest. I gravitate toward this object for the essential role it has in our lives. It holds our daily meals, stores and preserves crops and water or taking the idea further, lakes and oceans are contained, and ultimately life itself is somewhat contained within the stratosphere. These paintings are echoes of the concept in my mind, of "holding", yield, plenitude and emptiness. I hope you enjoy the energy in this show. It was completely enjoyable painting it. Camillo De Luca

Artist’s Statement David Freney-Mills – Gallery Elysium 2021 Through his paintings, Melbourne artist David Freney-Mills explores the visual properties of text. He does this via painting layers of ink on Mulberry paper, choosing a single word for each painting. Through fragmenting and repeating the text he creates abstract arrangements that convey a sense of flux and transformation. Freney-Mills’ paintings are akin to organisms made up of accumulated layers and traces of decisions. In different paintings the text overlaps in chance combinations, weaving throughout the atmospheric surfaces created by the artist. Freney-Mills uses text to represent matter and it’s shifting nature as a vehicle for energy. The text is also evocative of human consciousness in a state of constant re-invention, absorbing perceptions of colours and light from the outside world while also focused within it’s inner space, both outer and inner worlds have frontiers for awareness to push into, in both directions a void is contemplated, not a sterile void but one fertile with possibilities from which all forms, all ideas and realizations come.

10. Dionysian Reverie, Oil on Canvas, 153x137cm , Price: $8,950 The ancient Greeks (and later the Romans) held festivities in honor of the God of wine and intoxication, Dionysus. The ‘Bacchanalia’ as the Romans referred to it after Bacchus, their name for Dionysus, was a drunken celebration where celebrants indulged in pleasures bestowed on them by the God through his gift of wine.

Mythos. An exhibition by Elio Sanciolo. Introduction Ever since we as humans developed a sense of ourselves as rational creatures with a need to understand our purpose and individual and collective place in relation to the world, we have wondered about the nature of existence and how things came to be as they are. Our individual and collective life experiences inform us about what we can actually know about the world in detail at any particular moment in time, but there are things beyond our direct perception due to the innate limitations of our senses, that we can never fully understand, or know at all with any certainty. The indistinct, and mysterious void that exists between our certainty about the world and what we can only infer about the world indirectly is the domain of myth and religion, and it is this nebulous area that I chose to explore for this last of a series of exhibitions dealing with time, perception, and memory. In this instance, cultural memory. As was the case in the previous two exhibitions (‘Future Memories’ and ‘Opus’) , I was not concerned so much with exploring what we see, but rather how we perceive, recall, and construct our experiences of the world, through the filter of culture, time, and memory. In order to do this, I looked at narratives and characters taken from the products of our collective cultural memory as memorialized in myth as a source of compositional inspiration. Hence the name and theme of this exhibition.

“I use painting as a tool to explore and play with ideas and connect me to culture and history. I do this to discover who and what I am, the nature of the world and my place in.” 'The artistic process is the distillation of conscious and unconscious experience through the filter of the body which is in turn embedded in a transient reality.'

“I use painting as a tool to explore and play with ideas and connect me to culture and history. I do this to discover who and what I am, the nature of the world and my place in.” 'The artistic process is the distillation of conscious and unconscious experience through the filter of the body which is in turn embedded in a transient reality.'

‘OPUS’

An exhibition by Elio Sanciolo

Artist Statement

Background.

As the title suggests, this exhibition is based on music. As a painter I have always been fascinated by music. My childhood was full of it. My parents blessed me with musical experiences that have ingrained themselves so deeply in my mind and heart that I cannot remember a time when music was not present. Music is ,in many ways, the supreme artform as it transcends culture, language, subject-matter and the need to objectively represent something for it to be understood, appreciated, and felt. In of itself, the use of music by visual artists in creating their work is not an original idea. Many visual artists, have at some stage, found the urge to refer to or comment on music as a source of inspiration and emotional release in their work. So why did I choose music as a general theme for the current exhibition? To answer this, I will need to briefly refer to my previous ‘Future Memories’ show which dealt with our understanding of time and its relation to our perception and understanding of the world. In preparation for that exhibition, I came across philosophical and scientific writings on the nature of Time and consciousness which postulated that all actions/events exist simultaneously and are only perceived to be sequentially and causally ordered in time by the limitations of our conscious mind, which somehow, filters through and organizes matter and events in a hierarchical sequential fashion to make sense of the world. In response to this theory, I sought to develop a visual language which would help me communicate this idea in an intelligible way. I ended up creating a series of works on canvas depicting the human form and other figurative elements on overlapping transparent pages signifying slices of temporal experience represented by rectilinear divisions on the picture plane. This pictorial device allowed for the construction and reading of an image on a metaphorical basis. It wasn’t long after my exhibition was over that I was looking at a score of a Beethoven symphony, and I was struck with the notion that musical compositions that involve two or more instruments could be viewed as a natural extension of the original insights which drove the creation of the works in my previous show.

Rationale.

Just like our perception of ‘reality’, symphonic scores, or multi-instrumental musical pieces, are constructed of different layers. These layers consist of the different individual parts written for the various instruments and sections in the Orchestra whose job it is, to amalgamate the various parts into a comprehensible whole. This is achieved by superimposing, coordinating, and playing each separate instrumental part over the others with related time signatures so that the resulting sound follows a consistent logic and ‘narrative’. Another interesting observation I made, was that the conventions used in the recording of musical concepts onto a physical score force the composer to conceive of the composition as a series of separate elements tied to an original foundational melodic or rhythmical idea, that are then brought together in real time by the performers in one unified expression of sound, to be finally interpreted by the listener. In other words, to effectively communicate ideas to the performers, and through them eliciting an emotional response in the audience, the composer has no choice but to dissect the original musical idea into a myriad of separate parts, each highlighting a different aspect of the subject at the heart of the music, and then have the musicians reintegrate them into a new multifaceted whole so that the audience can absorb, interpret, and appreciate the totality of the music.

Approach.

With this in mind, I approached the creation of a series of works in this current exhibition in the same way as a composer would approach the construction of a symphonic score. Layer by layer and free of the restrictions imposed by the need to produce an overly literal interpretation of the subject but keeping the overall aesthetic integrity intact. To do this, I resolved to use the central figurative components consisting of the human form and landscape elements as compositional devices designed to centre the composition and give the viewer a way into exploring the images embedded in the various layers of the painting. I approached this in much the same way as a composer may use a melodic line to draw the listener emotionally into the music. The figurative elements were going to be my melody and use of color and line used to set the rhythm. Each individual work in this exhibition was initially inspired by my personal response to a given piece of music and then allowed to develop in its own organic direction. As I progressed from painting to painting, and depending on the original musical source, I found that the figurative elements in some works would dissolve into the overall design or be totally subdued by areas of color to the point where they would only leave a trace of their original imprint, thereby giving the impression from a distance of a total abstraction, that when closely inspected, revealed its figurative origins so that the viewer is forced to move from the surface , through the various layers of the painting to the drawing underneath and then back to the surface again. I attempted, through simultaneously emphasizing both opposite abstract and figurative qualities, to create a harmonious tension between literal meaning and metaphoric interpretation, which to my mind, approximates how music itself works and is able to satisfy the rational mind whilst imbedding itself in the heart. Elio Sanciolo March, 2023.

13. Eros & Psyche, Oil on Canvas, 153x137cm Price: $8,950 Eros, also known as Cupid by the Romans, was sent by Aphrodite (Venus) to punish Psyche for being as beautiful as she was. Eros’ mission was to shoot Psyche with one of his arrows so that she would fall in love with a monster. Eros, however, accidentally pricked his finger with one of his own arrows and immediately on seeing her fell in love with Psyche.

17.Gaia, Oil on Canvas, 137x100cm Price: $7,750 According to myth Gaia was the ‘Earth Mother’, ancestral mother of all life. She is the mother of the Titans, therefore ancestor to the Olympian Gods themselves. She is the personification of the earth and nature. The Romans referred to her as Terra.

The questions occur. How to paint nothing? What does it mean to paint nothing? What does it mean to paint a void?

I let myself go, apply marks, streaks, splashes of colors onto the canvas, to make them resonate with all the intensity that can be imagined.