Gucci Garden Archetypes
The Gucci Garden in Florence

Gucci Hallucination
Spring Summer 2018

Creative Director: Alessandro Michele
Art Director: Christopher Simmonds
Artwork: Ignasi Monreal



















“It took the Spanish artist Ignasi Monreal eight hundred and sixty-six hours to strip his physical presence from his body and transport it to an eternally resplendent place, a non-place - etymologically from the Greek roots ou - not - and topos - place -, which borders on impossibility. It took several months of work, fourteen hours a day without breaks, to create the paintings narrating the Gucci Spring Summer 2018 collection. Ignasi got to the point of, in his words, being prey to "Gucci hallucinations".

Monreal's paintings are distinguished by realism, giving shape to hybrid universes, at times pop and symbolist, elsewhere enchanted and alchemic, a world of pre-Raphaelite and Renaissance beauty placed "behind the mirror", where the sun never stops setting and the moon always caresses your face with its pale glow. Monreal's make-believe is the realm that hosts a thousand combinatory possibilities of allusion and reference: spaces with elusive perspectives reminiscent of metaphysical architectures are populated by hyper-realistic presences, fairytale landscapes mise-en-scène with bizarre mythological creatures of medieval invention, while sixteenth century Dutch still-lifes coexist with surrealist reveries.

In the film, an office with white walls is transformed into a virtual window on Ignasi's painting, which, in turn, places Alessandro Michele's collection in a reverie and makes precious details and luminous fabrics shine. Small paintings in which to happily be imprisoned, inside a hallucination, somewhere other than the world, in places somehow absolutely different, but possible, improbable spaces, and in fact real.

Gardens, museums, the theater and even idleness are heterotopias. Monreal's mural room is not an optical illusion, it is the reality of a mind that offers itself with generosity and an abundance of details where we are the guests of his imagination.”



Cited from #GucciHallucination Spring Summer 2018
























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