Passage, Casa Italiana Zerrilli-Marimò, New York
Casa Italiana Zerrilli-Marimò at New York University is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Italian Artist, Geppy Pisanelli, entitled Passage. The artist will present three large oil paintings made between 2011- 2013, a new set of oil paintings from the Clouds series, and for the first time, a series of pastels on paper.
The title of the exhibition, Passage, reflects a fundamental conceptual point in Pisanelli’s art. Always present in his work, this “passage” reflects a transition from an image belonging to a sensible world to a conceptual dimension, from a tangible image to a transcendent one. For the artist, painted images are a pretext for communicating something else and are the starting point, a “passage,” to guide the spectator in another direction.
For example in the painting, The Gold Swing, that will be displayed in the first room of the Casa Italiana, we can observe a swing suspended in a black-colored atmosphere. In collective imagery, the swing refers to the playfulness of childhood. However, in this context lacking any point of reference, its dark and gloomy atmosphere annihilates the initial meaning and rises to the role of metaphor. What does it represent? A sense of emptiness? Uncertainty? Or the only thing to hold onto in the silent darkness? The meaning of his work remains coded. The spectator always has the last word. The way he feels creates different levels of interpretation.
The series of works, Clouds are for the artist, an occasion to focus his interest more on the composition, on the relation between light and darkness and especially color, and thus ultimately on the abstraction. Pisanelli has referred to them as the subtle line between figuration and abstraction, which for him always has figurative underpinnings. In fact, he says, “If the spectator can detach from the image of clouds that our perception manufactures by force of habit, he may be able to catch some elements of abstraction in its unnatural colors or composition.”
The pastels presented in this exhibition for the first time, are for the artist an important part of his art. The use of pure pigment in this works results in a very luminous Manu fact that maintains all the characteristics of brightness and color saturation of oils on canvas, adding, for the nature of the medium, a warm intimacy to the work
The title of the exhibition, Passage, reflects a fundamental conceptual point in Pisanelli’s art. Always present in his work, this “passage” reflects a transition from an image belonging to a sensible world to a conceptual dimension, from a tangible image to a transcendent one. For the artist, painted images are a pretext for communicating something else and are the starting point, a “passage,” to guide the spectator in another direction.
For example in the painting, The Gold Swing, that will be displayed in the first room of the Casa Italiana, we can observe a swing suspended in a black-colored atmosphere. In collective imagery, the swing refers to the playfulness of childhood. However, in this context lacking any point of reference, its dark and gloomy atmosphere annihilates the initial meaning and rises to the role of metaphor. What does it represent? A sense of emptiness? Uncertainty? Or the only thing to hold onto in the silent darkness? The meaning of his work remains coded. The spectator always has the last word. The way he feels creates different levels of interpretation.
The series of works, Clouds are for the artist, an occasion to focus his interest more on the composition, on the relation between light and darkness and especially color, and thus ultimately on the abstraction. Pisanelli has referred to them as the subtle line between figuration and abstraction, which for him always has figurative underpinnings. In fact, he says, “If the spectator can detach from the image of clouds that our perception manufactures by force of habit, he may be able to catch some elements of abstraction in its unnatural colors or composition.”
The pastels presented in this exhibition for the first time, are for the artist an important part of his art. The use of pure pigment in this works results in a very luminous Manu fact that maintains all the characteristics of brightness and color saturation of oils on canvas, adding, for the nature of the medium, a warm intimacy to the work