The Light, through

 

 

 

by Cynthia Penna

 

 

Artworks are physically installed in the spaces of ART1307 Studio in Napoli Italy, at Rampe S. Antonio a Posillipo 104 Napoli

Two artistic personalities put together for the first time in a virtual exhibition that talks of light, color, crossings and transits, shadows and hope.

Works that apparently seem to belong to the same pictorial “family”, seem to have a world in common and instead, going deeper into the single themes dear to the artists, differences appear very evident.

A common universe is to be found in the light, in the influence of Californian light on the works and in the practice of surfing as a way of life and spirituality.

Perhaps a common aesthetic background inspired by John McLaughlin’s minimalist and hard-hedge experiments directs the research of both artists towards a kind of abstract art made up of planes of color alternating with planes of “light” that seem to chase each other indefinitely. This pictorial grammar leads to a meditative introspection on the relationship between man and Nature this last one declined as energy of light, as an immersive experience in an atmosphere of rarefied light that links them to the Californian movement “Light and Space”.

But the connections between the twos end here: Evans’ language is more aimed at an abstraction that finds its foundation in the daily experience of confronting the natural power of the ocean through the practice of surfing. A practice that becomes a philosophy of life; relationship with space as the spatiality of the ocean and relationship with the light that is reflected from it. A link to a naturalistic universe that in Evans shuns any descriptive reference, but which is consolidated through the alternation of fields of color and fields of light.

As he affirms in an interview released to the curator Cynthia Penna, about the vertical lines of alternate colors that appear in his works: “….You are speaking about a formal device in painting to direct or indicate to the viewer to pause or shift within the picture plane. Think of them as punctuation or a break and redirection”

Evans’ chromatic and tonal apparatus is a pictorial expression of the visual perception of the surrounding environment: it poses as a visual reduction and translation through pure color of the environment in which the artist is immersed.

“The meaning of the alternance of dark and light in the paintings is life. Sometimes you seek the light and other times you need to be in the shadows. Breath in, breath out. Ying/Yang “

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Peter Lodato has a more constructivist approach to painting: his alternating planes of colors rather represent “crossings” from areas of shadow to areas of light.

Mostly linked to McLaughlin’s rectangular planes, Lodato starts from an almost neo-plastic conception of painting using a technique, dear to McLaughlin, of layering rectangular bars on adjacent floors; his works do not have an exclusively Zen meditative purpose as in McLaughlin, but rather a more explicit connection to the architectural and theoretical construction of the crossings from dark areas to areas invaded by light.

The intersection between internal and external spaces, and an architecture that flows beyond the interior of the building seem to be his inspiring moments.

 

No dark-colored field ends with a “closure”, but the blurred edges in one with the absence of definitions between one field and the other, lead the artist to an architectural construction of areas of crossing the space; locus of passage between a spatiality immersed in darkness to one invaded by light, the first accesses the second as in imaginary labyrinths that lead to an exit. A metaphor of life alternating between moments of darkness and moments of great vitality.

Even his sculptural works derive from a mathematical construction of forces in space: an inverted pyramid section with the vertex pointed towards the center of the earth, the open roof, two entrance “doors” aligned oblique for a crossing of the internal space, are elements that emanate from a constructivist image of the object itself.

However from so much diversity, a common visual grammar emerges in the works of either Evans or Lodato: it is given by the powerful environment that surrounds them. The “blurred” vision of the margins of the color fields, present in the works of both the artists, this sort of “flickering” of the margins, this impossibility of focusing the entire vision of the work, represents in a pictorial key the environment where the ocean dominates, the intensity of the light and the trembling/twinkling of the air that immerses the entire city of Los Angeles as in a lifelong dream.