RESTART

by Cynthia Penna

Let’s start from ourselves.

ART1307 re-opens to live exhibitions after the long lockdown period, and to celebrate this re-birth we are opening our studio as a completely renovated exhibition space. For this reason we have decided to show the artworks of  three artists who represent the three countries Italy, USA and Japan that have accompanied our artistic life for the last 13 years.

Our old acquaintance who has worked with us for many years, the Japanese Yasunari Nakagomi, was joined by two artists both new entries of our association: the American Mika Cho and the very Italian, or rather Campano, Alfonso Sacco.

Color and the study of color seems to be the leitmotif of this exhibition. Color as a pictorial modality in a technical sense, but also color as an expression of vitality and strength.

Nakagomi has created new works on paper, revolutionizing his style. The formal structure of his works on canvas is radically subverted by the introduction of vertical brushstrokes and lines of color that intersect or overlap each other; the work has acquired a dynamism given by fat, full-bodied brushstroke that leaves no room for the stillness of the image. The declination of color, however, remains the original one: evanescent in a way that blurs the visual perception. His new landscapes are now more then before landscapes of soul: a landscape as an interior research, interior interrogation about life and time in this period. The perception of time is totally modified in a way that it seems to pass in an instant or sometime it seems never passing by. The interpretation of this strange sensation is given by blurring lines and colors that contain movement and a new vitality .

Mika Cho, Art professor at California State University, Los Angeles.

Her painting technique is definitely linked to the Rothkian “color fields” so important in post-war American abstraction; her fields of color are composed of an intense layering of oil color that the artist uses wisely. Cho’s works are never dull, they are not rhetorical, they are not trivial. In these works, a narrative is perceived that does not stop at the mere surface of the work but penetrates deeply into the soul of the viewer. Shades of colors and light create a whole narration of human events made up of mental and unconscious images. The works contain entire stories that are filled by the viewer’s soul and imagination. Cho’s works invite to a calm and serene meditation and to let oneself be carried away by lost memories and sensations.

Alfonso Sacco opens a narrative page focused on memory and does so by expressing himself only through color; color that uses in all its forms.

Sacco is the most “expressionist” of the three artists; the most “objectual” as it acts through the repetition of a specific mark, the one of the fingerprint, that determines a uniqueness that distinguishes mankind like DNA.

The fingerprint is in itself memory; memory of one’s experience, memory of one’s origin, of one’s intimacy, memory of one’s past, of self and of when.

Individual space and time united under the sign of a single fingerprint that is self-memory.

But the beauty of Sacco’s works is that of liveliness, of a constant movement, almost a dance that these fingerprints create by overlapping or approaching one another. A crowd of humanity that palpitates and mingles in the dance of life. Cosmic order in apparent disorder.