Illumina, custodisci, reggi e governa me (Enlighten, guard, hold and govern me)
Luca De Gaetano

Curated by Chiara Boscolo, with a critical essay by Giada Pellicari

From January 27 to March 25 2023
Opening on Friday, January 27, 2023, at 6 PM

10 & zero uno, Castello 1830, via Garibaldi, Venice

——

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic,
in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are,
in the power of creating magical illusions,
in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed
[...]
William Butler Yeats, 1901

llumina, custodisci, reggi e governa me (Enlighten, guard, hold and govern me) is the title of Luca De Gaetano's new project that refers to a very common prayer in the Christian tradition. Angel of God immediately takes us into a spiritual and a mystical dimension, at the same time.
It is a phrase that takes on the form of a mantra in its circularity and repetition. It alludes, at once, to an invitation for a feeling of protection and security.
For this exhibition, De Gaetano highlights some of his strong esoteric and religious interests, deriving from years of study of symbolism relating to the world of tarology and paganism, combined with his Catholic culture. 
The space of the 10 & zero one art gallery, which with this exhibition inaugurates its new venue at Via Garibaldi, thus becomes a translation on an atmospheric level - understood as a spatialized feeling - of the same energy that one breathes in the artist's Milanese studio, a creative and intellectual place where he unfolds his painting practice on a daily basis accompanied by two cats. 
After a long time in the United States, the artist returned to Milan, where the two series of works presented on this occasion were conceived over the past year: witches and clairvoyants, together with flowering eyes, a cycle centered on the power of the gaze. 
In some works, a circular scenario recalling the initial mantra emerges. We find either centripetal or centrifugal forces that can make these characters curve, elongating limbs, or stretching spaces.
In his practice, we can recognize a combination of different and complementary elements, drawing from the sacred and the profane worlds, from everyday life and eroticism, and from high and low cultural registers. There are clear iconographic references to the history of art as well as to pop culture, featuring characters known to all.
In the art world, we are facing an increasing emergence of themes related to the world of spirituality. These are topics that have been continuously present but left under the radar, whereas several international exhibitions have highlighted them recently, such as: The Botanical Mind at the Camden Art Centre; Tantra at the British Museum; Supernatural America at the Minneapolis Institute of Art occurring from 2020 onwards, anticipated by the exhibition Believe Not Every Spirit, but Try The Spirits, curated by Lars Bang Barsen and Marco Pasi in 2015 in Australia.
Of course, I would like to also mention the last Venice Biennale entitled Il Latte dei Sogni curated by Cecilia Alemani. Here, an emphasis was placed on certain points relating to spiritualism and magic, which prominently emerged in the time capsule The Witch's Cradle.
We could affirm that this type of research can find its origin in another Biennale, namely the Palazzo Enciclopedico curated by Massimiliano Gioni. For instance, in that case, great space was given to the theosophical artist Hilma Af Klint, the magician Aleister Crowley and the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung.

Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that De Gaetano's works were not conceived to follow this trend, as his research on such themes has existed since he has been involved in painting. However, they fit into this type of analysis of contemporary visual culture, which should certainly be explored further at an academic level.
The series of works on display in this exhibition are instilled in a pictorial journey that has continually fielded and mixed eroticism and mysticism, queer and sacred images, combined with a long career of portraiture mainly dedicated to friends.
The pictorial process is accompanied by the use of drawing. The canvas is drawn in colored pencil, then filled in with layers of oil paint, at first thin, later, and progressively thicker. The use of embroidery is added to this practice in some works. In this case, this is believed to be a method of creating a sort of magical and artistic amulet made with the use of colored cotton thread. It is also interesting to see the back of these.

Luca's witches are creatures of great power.
On the subject of witchcraft, historian Peter George Maxwell-Stuart of St. Andrews University in Scotland writes that:
”[…]  it would be easy to argue that witchcraft is what a witch does, defining this figure as the person, male or female, considered as such by law and popular culture in the region in which they live and for the duration of their life.”
Here, the witches here are female warriors. They are named 'protectors', 'soldiers', and 'guardians'. Intelligent and emancipated, a kind of “Minervas”, they have boots and high heels and are certainly contemporary given the use of fluorescent colors. In contact with both artificial and natural elements, such as water springs, meadows, and mountains, they are sometimes placed in domestic interiors. We often find them juxtaposed with a refrigerator, intended as a contemporary lair where raw materials are stored and preserved. A sort of strange, frozen chamber of wonders, where statues, amulets, and cats appear amidst the food. We also detect primordial and reptilian attitudes such as one brutally defecating in the kitchen, albeit with a certain charme, for instance in Guardian Witch I - The Blue Fridge Will Release Your Pain. Sometimes the refrigerator is associated with strangely foreign contexts, within landscapes that seem archaic and distant. It thus becomes a kind of emotional baggage dragged along a nomadic pilgrimage, comparable to a psychological state where one never feels at home. Here, the idea of protecting one's body and one's fragility is fundamental. After all, these witches can become helpers who could assist us.

The sensation of being in front of a magical and persuasive creature is clear in the painting Mystic Witch I - The Ingredient I Was Looking For Was Already There, where the protagonist is an abruptly curved and sinusoidal being holding a mushroom. It is a work that should be observed in a warm, soft light to best appreciate its inviting outflow.
We are probably dealing with a green witch, specializing in herbs and plants. It may remind us of a deaconess, taking as a reference what the scholar Christoph Daxelmüller wrote about the relationship between the subject of the 'saint' and that of the 'witch', in a book that traces certain relationships between Christianity, superstition, and magic. In this text, it is explained that such type of woman, at the dawn of Christianity, participated in ritual activities within celebrations in the same way that men did, namely by taking part in the liturgy. With the consequent reference to some of St Paul's texts on the necessity of women's silence in the church, he explains that such an interesting figure was subsequently relegated to ancillary roles. Witchcraft and its study are thus intimately linked to dimensions concerning the emancipation of women and research on feminism.
The analysis of feminine energy also starts from a series of readings that the artist has made on the moon-mother relationship and on plant medicine, which I would like to address here in a Plinian sense. For instance, it is recalled that Pliny the Elder dedicated long chapters in his Naturalis Historia to magic, where he found a close relationship between this one, medicine, religion and the mathematical arts.

The work Witch Soldier II - As You Defend All That I Have Found, I Will Bring the Light to You is of particular note in this show. A cinematic and narrative organization of the canvas is surely visible here, moving from left to right, as in a storyboard. There are three identifiable vertical bands: the soldier witch near the refrigerator, an element almost always present in the works, the table dedicated to reading tarot cards, a creature in the background secluded from the world because she is obsessed with publishing posts on Instagram. It is clear that this work is full of details and difficult to find at first glance.
In the center, a tarology session is silently in progress, during which the tower, the devil, the wheel of fortune, and the stars come out. Here, the reference is probably to the best-known decks used in the European tradition, i.e. the Tarot de Marseille and Rider-Waite, particularly familiar to the artist. In addition to these, there has been a more recent interest in the symbolism of the Sola Busca Tarot from his part: a 15th-century deck that is one of the oldest entirely preserved, which is attributed to the painter Nicola di Maestro Antonio d'Ancona and is part of the Brera Museum collection, in Milan.

The great strength of the first series on witches dialogues intimately with the softer, more delicate one on flowers. This is certainly a more intimate project, even in its dimensions.
It speaks to us about nature and the alternating seasons, understood here as the cyclical flowing of time, almost a form of spiritual renewal. The protagonists of these paintings are silent gazes, suggesting a tacit communication. They emerge with temper and persuasion, they have feline and magnetic features. They are, in truth, well-known eyes from popular culture or family members, gazes of women who can be considered symbols of female archetypes, such as Alda Merini, Lady Diana, Bette Davis, Sandra Milo.
Finally, the mother Daniela, who always returns.

Text by Giada Pellicari
(translated by the gallery)