'CARADRIO' by Diego Gualandris & Riccardo Sala at TILE Project, Milan

The Caradrio is a mythological creature, a legendary bird mentioned by Socrates in the Platonic dialogue “Gorgia” to portray the habits of the lustful man. Formerly described for its ability to defecate during nourishment, in the Middle Ages the animal was charged with a salvific character because it was able to absorb the diseases of the sick only by sitting on their beds and flying against the sun to set them free. As a symbol of purity and sacrifice, the Caradrio was then associated with the image of Jesus Christ, appearing in pagan-style Christian representations. The different stories that linger around this creature, witness a specific kind of cultural transmission that, over the centuries, through superstition and paganism have linked Greek mythology and oral culture to Christianity. Within this contamination of cultural sources and iconographies, the imaginary that brings  together the practice of the two artists takes shape. Both are involved in a research on visual language that has translated over time reflections on the terrain, on the celestial and on their connection, which characterize the Mediterranean culture. This research has not been developed starting from a generic anthropological study, but from a rediscovery and deconstruction of their personal stories, which are themselves the result of a mixture between Catholic education, the 80s-90s culture of fantasy fictions, the fascination for the mythological and the fairy-tale, the study of cosmological and theosophical theories. Gualandris and Sala translate the elements that construct their imagination by creating paintings and sculptures that appear as visions, parts of tales not explicit but simply open to being read. Working on the combinatorial structures characterizing the mythology, the fairy tale and the Renaissance anecdotal literature, the two artists develop a language that, maintaining a correspondence with reality, comes alive thanks to references from the oneiric and metaphysical world. Sculptures conceived as portable scenarios, sections of sky, landscapes and grotesque characters, are the different elements inserted into a game of correspondences and roles that transform the exhibition into a narrative environment, an imaginary space.