Sopra | Sotto

Omar Hassan 

Opening: 2/7/2020, 11-21 by appointment - info@prometeogallery.com 

From July 3rd to September 10th

Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani | Via G. Ventura 6, Milan

777 kilometers separate Via Ventura 6 in Milan and Via dei Mille 60 in Naples, respectively Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani and PAN - Palazzo delle Arti in Naples. 

96 are the hours it will take Omar Hassan to travel through Italy round trip, to dismantle his solo exhibition in Naples and to set up the new one in Milan, highlighting, in fact, the performative vein that distinguishes him as a painter. 

With these premises opens Thursday, July 2, SOPRA, the show that consolidates the relation between Prometeo Gallery and Omar Hassan.   SOTTO

Faithful to the principles of Prometeo Gallery, the artist of Egyptian origin, does not remain motionless in front of a confused landscape to give himself time to be clear again. On the contrary, with his fighting spirit and his similar pictorial research he concretizes the ideas of movement and local action, as if time had no purpose, but was included and understood.

By working on distance and proximity, not only as a common practice of space and time, but as a real way of seeing, Omar Hassan gives the possibility to get into a privileged position, in-tra-fra a time that leaks into the interstitial and apparently inessential spaces within which life infiltrates. When he wears his boxing gloves (Breaking Through). When he leaves a trace of the time he takes in his productions (Timelines).  When he repeats how a daily gesture points to spray pushing towards the synthesis of street art, rationality and irrationality, with a direct reference to his private life (Injection). When he paints on reproductions of the Winged Victory of Samothrace or on the caps of spray cans (Caps), Omar Hassan succeeds in the ambitious desire to give tangible form to a time of difficult definition, which by definition cannot be represented or understood. 

How? By giving the body of his works the character of the result of an addition, that is the sum of action and idea, going beyond the simple description of what happens to give instead the possibility to understand the aesthetic scope, the nature and the quality of the processes of his gesture. In this way one can settle in the totality of the exhibition surface and insinuate oneself into the intervals between one work and another, encouraged to question oneself and use one's gaze in a different way to inhabit time in-tra-fra.