Surregailism, is a brand-new word, invented by the artist himself to highlight
the authenticity and originality of his painting, as well as the uniqueness of his linguistic
and expressive code. One could recognize a Gai painting among thousands of others.
Its peculiarities are the special use of color and material, the use of “wounds” and “tears”,
the personal and bold pictorial gestures, the synthesis skills that allow the painter to combine
into just one image Surrealism, Expressionism, social Realism and Existentialism. This sense
of unity is achieved in a free way, without any constraint or academic and intellectual
influences. priority is given to the instinctual component of Gai’s art, trying to escape from
any artificial definition. Corrado Gai always succeeds in being himself, in overcoming the
fear of conventions, in putting all that he feels and perceive as an important and useful
message on canvas. A kind of new painting seems to take shape with Corrado Gai: new for
its extraordinary ability in connecting historical avant-gardes with topical problems. New in a
kind of stylistic expression in which pictorial gesture and matter overcome tradition and
propose a modern and lively language. New in the aims and purposes that it addresses to
contemporary man, to the society of our hard times, a society that is prey to uncontrolled
consumerism and to wild globalization without stable reference points, without point of
reference or truly universal values. In the context of this reality Corrado Gai’s art wants to be a
denunciation and, at the same time, a proposal of values and alternative truth, thanks to its
harshness and truth.The artist from Leghorn, though so young, seems to rise to the status
of creator and leader of a different and more authentic way of expression, that with great
strength and conviction wants to propose a marked change for new generations. This
change is like a return to one’s origins, to that simple life that still believes in emotions and
feelings, to mankind and to its capacities, to the beauty of nature and to the immense lightness
of poetry.

By Luciano Carini

“Surregailismo”: contemporary existentialism beyond storical surrealism

A new organisation of the cosmos and of the imaginary surroundings, the calmness after the chaos, and the chaos as a permanent and productive condition, the introduction for a free research from the inside towards the outside, in a direct mirror, in the vortical strength where the colour talks almost to the light: these are the “rooms” of a new poetical way of painting, the “Surregailism” of Corrado Gai, a young artist of Leghorn, self-taught talent, who introduces into a visionary scenery, from deep glances into the individual interiority, up to the reconstruction of the magnetic scenery of the existential contemporaneity.

A research over the limits of the surrealism, which challenges the concept itself starting from the successful semantic play, philosophical and self-ironic, which is created from the coincidence of the meaning of the artist’s name “Gai” and the denomination of the twentieth-century movement, in the strength of a research starting from himself, of the final concreteness of an eternal gift, turned towards the universe.

Works some of them with big dimensions, 2 x 4 meters and more, oil on canvas and three-dimensional collage, spectacular conceptual sculptures, built with ready-mades of sense and through coloured ‘organic’ filaments, memory of Burri, in a never finishing creative trip, which goes from the already historical works, realistic paintings of the first period, to the modulated landscapes, up to the recent pictorial productions where, under a symbolic key together with the surrealistic informal, returns the human figure.

Like this, strongly dynamic and creative explosions open their way to a stage made of delights and pain, which talk about the contemporary man without any veil in a perceptive seduction made of colour, light and magnetic - vortical dynamism. Highly tactile energetically and lyrically, the lesson of Van Gogh fallen into an informal surrounding, the automatic line of Mirò and the releasing vehemence of the COBRA group, characterize the last creation: an instinctual research for which the canvas and the collage are functioning as a contraposition, where also the image is recognizable, searching for themes of incisive psychological meditation, with a metropolitan-urban rhythm.

Corrado Gai was born in Leghorn 1977, where he still lives and carries out his continuing pictorial research in his studio in Via Solferino, Leghorn. Self-taught artist, a very characteristic heir of the labronical tradition, starting from his early works centred on classical tuscan subjects, realized with the clean “macchia” of colour, translates in his recent period into a language of strong suggestion, the whole portrait, becoming timeless, the thought and the emotional contemporary life.

By Elena Capone