LAS ISLAS FELICES

LAS ISLAS FELICES – Galería Victor Lope

In the collective imagination, the island is the ideal setting for the development of social utopias: paradisiacal environments, abundant resources, communities in harmony with nature, self-management, and equality among individuals that evoke a life free of worries. A reality that seems tailor-made, far removed from mundane problems.

It is within this seemingly idyllic scenario that Riccardo Nannini situates his new proposal: a series of recent paintings that continue the reflections explored in earlier works. Las islas felices returns to the theme of the individual and pursues its exploration further—this time by literally isolating his characters, either in small groups or alone, and placing them in separate settings composed of islands of various sizes and possibilities.

Islands for playing, islands for dancing, islands for one, islands for hiding treasures, islands for a simplified happiness, refuge islands, islands that offer everything we desire. The figures who inhabit them generally move about with ease; many choose to surrender to celebration, games, and leisure.

However, at a second glance, differentiated behaviours emerge: individuals who step away nostalgically from a cheerful group, who slip off to bury provisions and treasures, who devote themselves to productive activities, or who engage in more or less developed commercial exchanges in the form of barter.

Like Robinson Crusoes filtered through the artist’s sense of the absurd, Nannini presents characters who undergo their own path of transformation: from sailors to castaways, and from castaways to islanders. The island becomes a zero point, a promise of well-being whose outcomes depend on the dynamics one sets in motion. In the absence of structures that impose obligations, the passage from one stage to the next depends on each individual—on their decisions and on the ways they establish relationships.

Las islas felices is therefore a reflection on community and individuality, on fragmentation, isolation, and integration within a scenographic space stripped to its essentials to reveal modes of connection. Islands that function as small enclaves of interaction and as metaphors for the mechanisms that bring us together and pull us apart.