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Les yeux qui louchent Eng

Les yeux qui louchent

Igor Eškinja, Fritz Panzer, Manuela Sedmach, Michele Spanghero, João Vilhena

Venezia (I), Galerie Alberta Pane
September ― December 2017

TextThe artists
Desirable Strabismus
Daniele Capra




Reality is the condition in which we are immersed and in which we develop our existence in a subjective form thanks to the use of our senses and cerebral structures that allow us to order and elaborate experiences. As Kant wrote, “the consciousness of my own existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things outside me”:[1] the consciousness of existing therefore implies not just a boundary that defines me, but also the presence of something to know beyond me, on the outside. It is thus that we ourselves – by a continuous negotiation with other individuals – forge the interpretive instruments through which we perceive reality and the mental representations that map it.[2]


Every artistic practice based on reality – that is, that treats it as a subject to be delved into in its countless implications – requires the artist to have a sort of “double vision”. However, it mustn’t be specularly two-faced, like that of Giano, but must move forward on different trajectories. Indeed, if an eye must be turned towards that which is in front of it (that is, oriented forwards toward what is in his view), the other instead must look beyond – behind, below, above, elsewhere – and divergently, so as to take in an unordinary view of the world. The artist is therefore asked to make himself voluntarily and necessarily cross–eyed, in any case allowing him to sidestep the prefigured dictates of the orthogonality of sight. So he must visually – and even more so mentally – be outside his comfort zone, conscious that this condition must be transmitted to his works. Only thus is, his work more than just a description, empty caption or appendix, but an awkward element of tension that aims to delve into and make manifest the innermost reasons that comprise and animate reality.


The awareness that art aims to give the observer a critical reading of the world is fundamental if we don’t see the work of the artist as that of a mere producer of products with aesthetic properties, but rather as an intellectual practice that has a social utility in the Marxist sense. In the awkwardness of his own intellectual condition, visually and linguistically conveyed to the observer, a process of attention is thus activated, and that makes the cross-eyed artist an unorthodox sentry, gifted with geometric power – power of vision and of thought.




[1] I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, edited and translated by P. Guyer and A. W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 327.
[2] See P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, NY, Anchor Books, 1966.

The artists
Daniele Capra




In his research Igor Eškinja merges different visual planes, creating stratifications that lend themselves to multiple levels of reading. The Golden Fingers of Louvre series exposed overlaps the imaginative value of the French museum with the almost baroque pictorial detail of the imprints left by visitors. The marks of the hands are thus material elements that disorient the viewer, who is stimulated to direct his interpretation elsewhere, towards the visual abstraction or a possible Institutional Critique.


Fritz Panzer’s artworks are real drawings with real dimension of the represented subject made of metal wire, though they have a three-dimensional development. Thanks to the use of thin lines of iron, with which the corners and sharp edges of the object are outlined, the artist brings the volumetry back into a single visual plane, compressing fiercely its camouflaged potential and putting the viewer in a condition of perceptive ambiguity.


Manuela Sedmach’s works on canvas are the result of a minimalist pictorial exercise whose objective is to render visual landscapes in an undulating and profoundly intimate form, combining realistic aspects and elements that are the fruit of elaboration. Characterised by a limited palette of colours and a soft and hazy rendering of details, her artworks tell us of submerged and imaginary worlds, about the mental universes in which the spaces are not submitted to the rigidity of prospective metric.


With the Translucide series that stems from a reflection by Gilles Deleuze, Michele Spanghero analyses the way in which an image manifests itself to us in the form of a revelation that needs a translucent support on which it can lay. In a video and some photographic images, the artist makes this process concrete slowing it down exorbitantly, transforming the image into an event and a dilated flow of blindingly obvious information.


João Vilhena’s research is characterized by a conceptual use of drawing and painting. The series L’amour des corps arises by condensing, in the form of graphite drawing, the complex bond of visual nature featured by a woman with whom, fortuitously, the artist established a relationship of an exhibitionistic type. The images of her – aware of being seen – in the building in front of her window, are returned in poetic form, as snippets of an intense visual relationship, in which the spectator can take the place of the artist and get tangled up in a game of visual triangulations.

Andrei Ciurdarescu. Io nel giardino Eng

Andrei Ciurdarescu
Io nel giardino

Trento (I), Galleria Boccanera
October ― November 2016

Painting as philosophy
Daniele Capra




The art of Andrei Ciurdarescu is characterised by a painting that questions the constitutive matrices of reality by way of an analysis of memory and constitutive details. The Me in the Garden project presents intense figurative painting that analyse the constructive/destructive interactions between anthropic elements and nature in gardens: a metaphor for the conflict between opposed social, economic, political, and anthropological trends.

The show examines the proscribed space in which botany, aesthetics, and natural spontaneity collide and continuously adapt to each other. For Ciurdarescu, what is decided by the context, the limitations imposed by the location, the climatic and meteorological variables, and also the visual taste and culture of those who cultivate and tend gardens, are the triggers for an intense dialogue between different kinds of brutality: the voluntary and authoritarian one sparked off by humanity, and the random and necessary one determined by nature itself.

With a carnal and tactile painting, the artist in fact reveals the marks of the conflicts and insults that the passing of time has inflicted on both aspects. Grass grows and agaves, with their pointed leaves, lushly proliferate, lapping the stone paths, the crumbling ancient sculptures, and the boxwood hedges, all modelled with the firm hand of a lover of ars topiaria. Among the prickly pears painted by the artist, however, there crop up heads of divinities and philosophers, the busts of Roman emperors, even more sensual in the lustful abandonment caused by time: the seemingly incorruptible icons of an ancient and all-too-human world that fights in order not to die completely, not to be swallowed by history. Beauty, however, symbolised in some of the paintings by the presence of a sensual Venus, is only a fragmented prisoner of the past, a shred that is unable to oppose the power of change.

Ciurdarescu’s is a philosophical kind of painting that shows the anxieties of existence and the human desire to outlive ourselves, testified to by the remains that archaeology has given to us. And it is also a warning not to overestimate the constructive strength of our acts, not to endlessly trust in those of our actions that are aimed at glory.

Linda Carrara. Il pretesto di Lotto Eng

Linda Carrara
Il pretesto di Lotto

Trento (I), Galleria Boccanera
October ― November 2016

Reality, suspended angels and metamorphosis
Daniele Capra




Linda Carrara’s work arises from a reflection on the conceptual and mimetic dynamics of painting, and questions its representative intentions. It focuses on a free practice based on the creation of new worlds and new realities that produce entirely new visual relationships. In particular, the subject and the compositional structure, which are central elements in figurative practice, are just a pretext in the artist’s work, an opportunity to create an imaginative and suspended reality which leads the viewer elsewhere.

In general, differently to what we might generally think, the practice of figuration is not aimed at reality in itself. Its purpose is neither to copy reality (an aspect that Plato found deplorable), nor to represent it (as in Baudrillards’ famous simulacra). Indeed, this practice works around reality and changes it. In other words, it proposes a new and different reality, an incandescent material that can be understood only by those who have the sensitivity and the skills to interpret its linguistic codes. This situation is the result of two modern trends. The first one is the artist’s awareness of their own role, a situation which has gradually developed from the fifteenth century onwards. Thanks to this perception, artists have become aware of the importance of their own art and of their own intellectual work. They are finally free from being solely a vehicle for the content of their work, humble servants to the needs of their customers. The second aspect is a conceptual and anti-realist rift, in opposition to the idea of mimesis, which was seen with some artists from the late sixteenth century. These were the Mannerists, and they continued the strong anti-naturalist tendency that was the first to overcome, in linguistic terms, the limit which, until then, had only been considered as an oddity. We might consider that the twentieth-century avant-gardes, with their indirect way of relating to reality, have carried forward this approach, whether they are aware of it or not.

Linda Carrara’s artwork is a tributary of this river. Her painting is not like the work of a meticulous scribe’s, compelled to write down what he hears among all the background noise, nor is it the effect of a maverick hero’s forceful opposition to the stream of reality. Rather it is the consequence of a completely new, deeper drive that causes a deviation. In her work, painting is no longer either the child or the heir of reality: quite the opposite, it is a new character which increases all possible realities thanks to its own existence.

The objects displayed on the surface of her works are merely an excuse to challenge the cognitive value attributed to reality. In Linda Carrara’s research, painting itself is the hidden subject of her work, since it is the medium that evokes unconventional features of reality. In this way, her pictures are characterised by a free and precarious syntax, filled with silent poetic bewilderment and genuine contradictions of perspective. Pieces of wood, marble surfaces, sticks and small objects all serve to confirm the fact that they are not themselves, exactly as the writing states under Magritte’s famous pipe.

The artist’s work questions and embarrasses the viewer, encouraging them to talk about or speak of something else, without the need to be consistent with the topic or the nature of the context. In other words, Carrara’s artworks function as surreal and process-based devices which lead to a visual and thematic divergence. The title of the exhibition itself, Il pretesto di Lotto (The pretext of Lotto), is proof of this attitude. Indeed, her works led to wide-ranging discussions about many questions of art history which were relevant to the painting of Lorenzo Lotto. For example, there was a discussion about the natural/anti-natural sense of flight, as seen in the Trinity at the Bernareggi Museum, where Christ flies through the air illuminated from behind. Or about the Jesi Annunciation, where the Archangel is depicted suspended before he touches the ground. Or, again, about the Martinengo Altarpiece, where the angels hold the Madonna’s crown in their hands. I’ll not go into what led to this bewildering intellectual pleasure, but, even without discussing Carrara’s research (and over cookies and several coffees) to talk about something else was the best way to talk, intensely, about the deepest reasons for her artistic practice. A practice that ultimately encompasses suspension, change of direction, transformation and metamorphosis.

No beast so fierce Eng

No Beast So Fierce
Matteo Fato, Giovanni Frangi, Giuseppe Gonella, Aleksander Velišček

Canneto sull’Oglio (I), Bonelli Gallery
April ― July 2012

TextGli artisti
Reality Is Here
Daniele Capra




I was going to war with society, or perhaps I would only be renewing it. Now there were no misgivings. I declared myself free from all rules except those I wanted to accept— and I’d change those as I felt the whim. I would take whatever I wanted. I’d be what I was with a vengeance.
E. Bunker, No Beast So Fierce, New York: Norton, 1973.


We have spent the last decades on discussing the actuality and outdatedness of painting, decreeing its death and rebirth, continuously alternating moments of enthusiasm with others of scant attention, as if such a medium had within itself characteristics of actuality/outdatedness, regardless of the aesthetic, linguistic or political contents of individual works. Seen with modern-day eyes everything in our past appears as missed opportunities, intellectual Panglossian onanisms – Pangloss was Candide’s preceptor in the homonymous conte philosophique by Voltaire, who embodies the role of the chatterbox philosopher – too immersed in the part. Trivially we have adopted an ideological approach to this form of expression, from time to time charging the word painting with reactionary or progressive tendencies, to suit our own personal ends, and with an avant garde rhetoric that, now that we are at the height of the epoch following the post-modern, would appear to be on the wane. And it would, however, be useful to point out that even now in our country, in academic circles and in the jargon of the professionals in this field, the use of the word “painter”, in the sense of “artist who paints on canvas”, is used in a limitative form, implying, that is, a subtle disdain or negative evaluation towards the person concerned.
Painting, on the contrary, simply exists, on a level with the other media, above and beyond any possible and imaginable motivation, and does not need anyone’s approval or permission for existing, as it always has, from the caves of Lascaux and Altamira to Picasso (whom it appears liked to repeat that “after Altamira all is decadence”). You only need ears to listen to it speaking, to read those words that all too often have merely been manipulated. As a last resort we could thus define painting as an area of relations with their own codes but which undergo continuous micro-adjustments. If on the one hand the idea that the work is to all effects a hypertext in which one can move transversally and without a set chronological order still appears efficacious, we must not underestimate the fact that the hypertext itself is constantly and perennially being updated by the continuous work of those who participate both in the reception of the contents as well as the production. Thus we could say that the sense is a collective construction that takes place nowadays with the very same accelerated dynamics of the social networks: the hypertext is non fixed and completed, but is affected by a whole range of relations that keep the work under tension and have it belong to the world by “mundanely” assigning it the status of art.
Painting is all this and not exclusively one of the techniques used by artists: it is an ugly beast that plays with reality, starting with itself, and which continues to exist even if we are in the dark or we do not look in its direction, as the works of Matteo Fato, Giovanni Frangi, Giuseppe Gonella and Aleksander Velišček bear witness. In fact, the basic polarities of all methods of research, those approaches that when opportunely combined make it possible to place each and every artistic declination on an interpretive level, are present. The elements are those of a pure aesthetics mode, contrary to the political-sociological aspect and on an adjacent plane the perceptual visionary analysis that has a counterpart on the work itself in the meta-artistic reflection and in attempting a transformation.





If we deform the famous maxim “painting for painting’s sake” we realise it is the direction towards which Gonella is heading, careful to make of painting a speech about the surface, the composition and technique; as the engage is Velišček’s way, careful to unmask, even in its crudeness, the connections of power that symbols or pornography enact. Likewise Frangi researches perception and vision, the “emotion recalled in tranquillity” so dear to Wordsworth, whilst Fato reflects on the importance of the painting itself, of the subject and on the possibility of escaping from the nude, two-dimensional aspect of the medium.
Inevitably these are the main directions, the strongest components to which the four artists are attracted, but they are certainly not the only ones, given that, mundanely they are the outcome of complex interactions. Thus the game consists in identifying connections of strength and dependence between the polarities (with the methodological warning that the passe-partoute certainly does not open all the doors), using the required care and attention, seeing as how one is moving on a chess board that is first and foremost a battlefield. But it is from continuous friction that the dynamics of sense, of that value that transforms a piece of canvas or a paper into an object that never stops questioning us, are born. Reality is here: can’t you hear it knocking at the door?
Gli artisti
Daniele Capra




Matteo Fato
Matteo Fato’s works are born from his obsession for painting. The artist has always loved painting, to the point where he deprived himself, voluntarily, for over two years. His choice was useful for his own artistic survival: terminating this daily tie with this seductive and possessive lover was the only way he could avoid being flattened, minced and digested by it. Distancing himself meant regaining space and air in order to think about other things, escaping from the beast whose voracity requires daily nutriment.
The works in oils he has created for the exhibition starting from the end of 2011 mark, therefore, his mature, meditated return to painting, after the most radical demands had been metabolized, and following the task of out-and-out decanting – or better still, of purification – marked by the use of Indian ink and oriental calligraphy. During this period of transition Fato has thus carried out a reflection not only on the two-dimensional potentiality of painting, simultaneously developing a marked sensibility for the continuous, sinuous line, where the brush never leaves the surface but searches for complicity, in a gesture that is a continuous embrace.


Giovanni Frangi
Giovanni Frangi would have good reason to add the expressive and positive potentiality of the macchia, that mass of simultaneously controlled/uncontrolled colour, to Kandinskij’s Point and Line to Plane. The chromatic mass is the compositional element that creates rhythm, pauses, episodes of invention and, ultimately, music, both in the more delicate shades as well as in the condensation that both become full-bodied, materic.
In fact the works of this artist from Lombardy are real sheet music, musical-spatial devices that create a profound, spiritual sense in the progressive distancing from the image being. In that freedom where the idea of mimesys is far distant, the work appears to purify itself from the toxins of representation, which seem to dissolve on the surface, like snow under an August sun. Thus one can feel and hear the sound inside the colour, the brush strokes follow one another like polyphic music and the onlooker might unconsciously want to put his ear close to the canvas in order to see better.


Giuseppe Gonella
Giuseppe Gonella is an animal. This statement might seem tranchant, but his ability to generate paintings incessantly – neglecting the world and everything around him – is rousing for any observer who loves to lose himself in the details before his eyes. This artist from the Veneto region is, in fact, a tireless artisan of the canvas: it is the surface that is the true subject of his work, whilst the genre and academic expressive codes are destined to burn violently beneath the blows of his brush strokes. Thus, his is pure painting, the source, oxygenated by the oddities of mountain rocks and the roots of centuries-old trees.
His works are affected by the stylistic elements of German painting, the Leipzig school in particular as it has been one of the most important phenomena of the last twenty years. But Gonella has more than that; he has a compositional madness, followed by a continuous and intense activity of adding finishing touches, that develops an aesthetic tension that has enormous impact. Therefore his works are produced for an infinite germination, for a paratactic reiteration of elements that leave the spectator speechless. Seeing, with Gonella, means marvelling.


Aleksander Velišček
Politics and power – economic but also mediatic as images – are the great themes that are the basis of Aleksander Velišček’s works. Both in the portraits, as well as in the representations of violence in pornographic films, the relationships between the persons are degraded to a mere hierarchy. Pleasure, stimulation, success or popularity succumb to the enforcement of iron rules, of ubi maior and of a submissive part that ends up being masochistic. According to Velišček, in fact, images are all political, even if they do not deal directly with politics.
The Slovenian artist, close to Slavoj Žižek’s neo-Marxist sociological analysis, vindicates a close politicization of painting as an expressive medium. But at the same time, with methods that bring to mind expressionism, he is careful to load the canvas and the faces of his characters with colour and poison. There is no possible redemption, not even for the onlooker, obliged to endure the violence of this sight.

Antonio Bardino. Specchio specchio Eng

Antonio Bardino
Specchio Specchio

Venzone (I), Palazzo Orgnani-Martina
November ― December 2009

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