I STILL PAINT
08 jan 2020 – 28 feb 2020
I Still Paint, a significant selection of the latest works by Alessandro Scarabello. As is often the case in the human vicissitudes that affect the lives of artists, and particularly of painters, specific personal events bring big changes and considerable evolutions also in the artistic production. Thus, the relocation of Scarabello to Brussels, the discovery of an environmental and intellectual dimension that is highly compatible with the pictorial sensibility, the possibility of interpreting the interpersonal relationships, particularly with other artists, with a view to constructive collaboration, are all elements that have influenced the unfolding of everyday life in a way that they have found a happy and enthusiastic reflection in the work of the artist. From this came the choice of organizing this sixth solo show by Alessandro Scarabello, hosted at The Gallery Apart, as testimony and an interpretation of the evolution of the artist’s poetics and research during his recent years in Brussels.
In an age of revision of the painting practice, according to well-known cyclical trends from which one should keep a cautious distance, Scarabello chooses a title that is objectively ironic and subjectively poignant in order to highlight, on the one hand, that painting has a timeless and ever-changing function that makes it a medium with a strong adaptability to change and therefore intrinsically avant-garde; on the other hand, that his way of interpreting the medium is that of a daily dedication committed to finding new and different solutions; in other words, to Scarabello painting has always been and continues to be mainly research.
The works on display optimize the previous experimentation on the relationship between figuration and symbology, and between figuration and abstraction. By imposing progressive assignments of sovereignty on figuration, Alessandro Scarabello does not want to do away with the figure per se, rather he wants to commit himself, successfully and passionately, to the generating forces behind the images, to the mechanisms that govern the formation of the imagined image even before it is painted, to the automatisms that from who knows which interior meanders the power to produce irresistible associations of ideas.
Thus, Alessandro Scarabello expands the spectrum of his research, no longer only the human body and its infinite metamorphosis, but now also simple objects that the artist observes struck by their potential of morphing into something else and of containing in nuce different shapes. The artist becomes the medium of these transformations, eager to discover hidden meanings. Thus, a clothesline becomes a winged shape that evokes the Phoenix, or the metal corner joints used to build frames are assembled and used as moulds to investigate the concept of movement drawing inspiration from the pattern of the ancient Roman opus.
Within his personal archive of daily intimacy, Alessandro Scarabello has developed a passion for sensorial, experiential, symbolic and mythological elements that contribute to the formation of an image, thus in the end living and experiencing it with great emotional intensity even before it is even painted.
THE GALLERY APART
Via Francesco Negri, 43
Rome