2014 03 14 – 04 26. Ariel Soulé (Milan), Simon Toparovsky (Los Angeles) “La Colona Infame”.

Soulé had been painting and drawing since the early 1960s when, as a boy, he was allowed to attend courses at Instituto Directores de Arte in Buenos Aires, a multidisciplinary school that his father had founded in 1959. In 1967 he moved to Europe and, in Barcelona, was accepted at Escuela Massana de Arte where he was introduced to Theories of Color based on J. W. Goethe, J. Itten and H. Hofmann and focused on the study of Gothic Art.

In the 1970s Ariel lives in Italy, a country where the complexity of art widens enormously. He studies at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan. With his courses he developed an abstract and abstracting visual language that would provide a theoretical and practical basis for his artistic endeavors. The Academy was where Ariel studies the Renaissance, a major influence on his work. The same year he sets out on a study-journey of three months in Tuscany admiring the most impressive masterpieces.

Soulé begins to exhibit his work in important galleries in Italy at the end of the 1970s . In 1982 he was awarded the first prize of the Fondazione Michetti in Francavilla. From this recognition he is invited to participate in the New Young Artists exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. Exhibitions follow, outside of Italy, in Berlin and at P.S. 1 in New York.

In 1989 he was commissioned to use the Metro of Rome as the longest art gallery in the world. For this project he created works for the 42 stations of the subway system. In the next years follow exhibitions in public spaces and museums. He was invited by, curator, Renato Barilli to have a major solo exhibition at Palazzo dei Diamanti of Ferrara:Paradigma. The Museum of Modern Art of Gallarate organizes a retrospective exhibition,Mostra Antologia: 1973- 1993. The following year Soulé mounts another major solo exhibition, Labyrinthos, at the Museum of Modern Art of Spoleto, linked with the international Festival dei Due Mondi.

Soule’ began a continuing collaboration with the American sculptor Simon Toparovsky in 2002, sharing studios in Los Angeles and Milan. From their work together they developed a project , Chiasmo, where painting and sculpture combine as a unique work of art. From 2002 to 2013 the collaboration includes several exhibitions: La Costituzione Americana in Milan, Evita’s Perfect Fall in the Palazzo Comunale of Teglio, Qui, del Dicibile in a deconsecrated Gothic Church in the oldest center of Naples;A Letter From Renaissance, UCLA Library Special Collections – University of California Los Angeles and with the collaboration with the Getty Museum; La Colonna Infame, a traveling exhibition showed in the following Russian museums: Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg; Novgorod Center of Contemporary Art, Velikiy Novgorod; State Museum of Fine Art, Pskov; State Museum of Fine Art, Samara; Municipal Institution of Culture, History, Architecture and Landscape Museum, Tula. In 2014 La Colonna Infame travels to Lithuania where the exhibition is held at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius under the aegis of the Embassies of Italy and the United States. Again in 2014 Soule’ created an arrangement of 13 scenes painted in sequence: The Visit ( La Visita ), shown at Galleria Cortina in Milan. As much a philosophical operation as an artistic one, the guided route involves both a temporal cadence and reflection in movement. Each painting is accompanied by a freeze frame portraying apparent reality.