Page 6 - Contemporary Art and Old Masters

visions beneath the apparent vision of mundane Franceseo Clemente works on the progressive
things that are apparently closed and unequivocal.
Furthermore, it tends to manifest itself as a trace
of a wider, more concrete image, choosing to stay
in a deliberate state of transience. The transience
derives not only from the shadow or shading,
but also from the very little space and time its
execution requires.
The drawing always seems to reveal the artist’s
assault on the immaculate space of the paper.
Here, public and private coincide: the threshold
of expression occurs even before any sign is
implemented; it starts at the point of the mental
processing of the image, in the movement and
trembling of the hand on the paper.
Sandro Chia works through an array of styles,
always underpinned by technical skill and by
an idea of art that seeks its raison d’être within
itself. These reasons consist of the pleasure of a
painting freed at last from the tyranny of novelty,
and relying instead on the artist’s ability to use
various “means” of achieving the image. There are
numerous references, everything from Chagall to
Picasso, to Cezanne, to de Chirico, to Futurist,
metaphysical, twentieth-century Carrà. But the
recourse to style is immediately reabsorbed by the
quality of the result, at the intersection between
technical skill and “state of grace”.
Painting becomes the field within which manual
dexterity and concept finally find a balance. In
Chia, images always go hand in hand with a title,
a caption or a little poem painted directly onto
the canvas to reveal its internal mechanism. The
pleasure of painting goes with the pleasure of wit,
the ability to integrate the passion of the creation
of the picture and the protective distance of irony. allusive, and combining them seamlessly. Materials
The work becomes a moving circuit of internal and
external references, all at the service of an image
offering a dual quality: as substance both pictorially
and intellectually. In the first case the image is
fulfilled by the materials of which it is made up,
and in the second, it presents itself as a stunning
demonstration of an idea: an ideal of art only exists
if embodied in the texture of language. Chia‘s image
is always crystal clear.
6 WORLD of ART
displacement of the style, on the undifferentiated
use of several techniques. The underlying idea is
that of art that is in no way dramatic and that can
create an image where repetition and difference
intersect thanks to the nomadism of lightness.
Repetition stems from an intentional use of
stereotypes, references and stylizations that allow
the idea of conventionality to come into art too.
Such conventionality however is only apparent, as
the reproduction of the image never happens in
a mechanical or slavish way. On the contrary, it
tends to create subtle and unpredictable variations,
producing a shift in the reproduced image. This
shift, and the idea of time suspended deriving
from a state of relaxation, result in imperceptible
differences. This is possible because Clemente
works on the displacement of the signifier, on a
chain of assonances, of visual analogies that free
the image from all obligations and references.
All this creates a new contemplative state of the
image, a sort of peace, removed from the glamour
of its traditional references and given a different
orientation one that is explicit and deceptively
conventional.
The extreme explicitness tends to produce an image
that does not display any effort or awkwardness
vis-à-vis its surroundings. As if imbued with an
oriental discipline, the new image does not betray
any emotions, just a natural state of calm.
Enzo Cucchi radicalizes painting practice, taking
the picture as a means rather than an end. Painting
becomes a process of accumulating various
elements, figurative and abstract, explicit and
both within and outside the painting interact on the
surface of the picture. Everything responds to a
dynamic, unstoppable movement that drags painted
shapes and color lines beyond all laws of gravity.
The painting is a provisional repository of energies
that evoke images, densities of painting materials
and ceramic extensions beyond the traditional
canvas support. This type of work finds its roots in
the fabric of a deliberately “minor” painting, tied
to an anthropological and cultural territory that is
exquisitely Italian. From the point of view of visual