Francesco De Grandi
Hierophanie - il conflitto, il sacro e la natura.
Francesco De Grandi
Hierophanie
il conflitto, il sacro, la natura.
November 14, 2025 - January 3, 2026 - Ackerstraße 34, Düsseldorf (Germany).
In this triad, De Grandi's painting is not only representation, but ritual gesture, evocation, epiphany.
The weapons of hunting and war are ritual archetypes, symbolic extensions of sacrifice, emanations of a jealous and vengeful deity: the destroyer god, who recurs cyclically in human history, yesterday as today.
The gods that appear in these paintings are never Olympian or orderly. They are panicked, terrifying, or ambiguous figures, close to telluric, nocturnal, mythical powers. De Grandi moves in tune with Mircea Eliade's intuition: gods manifest themselves in unexpected places and gestures—in the forest, in blood, in the dance of sacrifice. Each painting is a small theophany, a partial, enigmatic, burning apparition.
The beasts are twofold: hunting animals, but also reflections of man and the gods. They embody instinct, panic, and the ferocity of the ancient world and the psychic depths. Sometimes they seem like victims, other times like unwitting priests. In the wake of the myth of Pan or the tauroctony of Mithra, the animal is often at the center of the ritual, as a sacrificial body or as a bearer of the sacred.
