02/05/2024 - 22/06/2024
Jana Schröder. D.A.M.
The exhibition grew out of the artist's interest in the legacy that Diego Armando Maradona left to the city of Naples. During a previous stay of hers, Jana Schröder was amazed at how gadgets, T-shirts, flags and scale reproductions of Maradona in the colors of the Neapolitan team invaded every street. The blue and white colors create a recurring landscape with cheerful and fun, almost familiar tones. Therefore, although the artist has no particular football interests, he decided to undertake a production whose colors recalled the connection with Maradona's Napoli.
"El Pibe de Oro" represents for Neapolitans the revenge of an area that until the 1980s had always remained on the margins. The popular identification in that young Argentine boy, raised in the most deprived suburbs of Buenos Aires, who led the team and the city to indelible victories ensured that the memory did not fade over time and that his figure became a myth.
Thus the large abstract white and blue paintings in the gallery rooms symbolize Maradona challenging the colors of other teams. Ideal teams that are pitted against each other in the gallery rooms with canvases of different colors ranging from acerbic green tones to orange to bright pink. The arrangement of the works does not follow the typical pattern; rather, the works stand in the space like soccer players on the field. In addition to the eleven canvases, there are eleven works on paper in the main room that reproduce an ideal formation made up of goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders and forwards, lined up as in a soccer scheme.
Each work follows declinations of shades of the same color combined with white. What varies is the texture of the gesture and its impression on the canvas. The artist also plays with lines and shapes, seemingly random, which instead subtend a pattern consisting of lines of different thickness, now sinuous now geometric that chase each other across the canvas. In pursuit of the rapid drying times of acrylic, the multidirectional movements of the fast brushstrokes become symbols of the purest pictorial gesture. Like a dense net that, however, does not trap the viewer, but acts as a bank accompanying his gaze.