Cipressi, accoglienza e tenerezza

13th May – 8th June 2023
opening Saturday 13th May 2023, at 6 pm

The exhibition Cipressi, accoglienza e tenerezza, by Resmi Al Kafaji opens on Saturday 13th May 2023 at 6 pm. at the Galleria Immaginaria in Florence.

Iraqi, born in Dywania, Resmi had already been working in the field of art for ten years when he had to leave his country for political reasons in 1977; he was thirty. Since then, his memory has remained of his land, “the beautiful memory”, his only medicine in difficult moments. but the detachment has not only caused pain and time has not passed in vain; another memory was slowly built over the next thirty years; the Italian one, Tuscan in particular, and these two memories, dancing like soft quilted veils of different spaces and times, have begun to overlap, slipping, revealing sudden contrasts, but also unexpected precious assonances.

Resmi’s works are of the same spiritual material as Klee’s watercolors painted in the light of Hammamet: proof of how artistic expressions can be very ancient and at the same time current, or perhaps better, they are present to today’s sensibilities because they have an archaic soul that it transmigrates over the centuries, transforming itself at every moment.

They are part of an imaginary absorbed by the artist in his balance between two cultural regions, between memory and the present, and each of them somehow leads to an autobiographical reference, a retinal impression, a memory, a symbol in which they encounter the tormented history of Iraq and the vicissitudes of its inhabitants, resistant, refugees, exiles, or the Tuscan landscape, the iconic Italian tradition, its predilection for the uniqueness of the story.