Fragments, Light

and Sound

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better
than the whole could.

G . O ' K e e f f e

ARTIST STATEMENT

To me, the fact that no two photographic prints are ever exactly the same is a perfect analogy of how I view painting. Photography has taught me that memory is fragile and uncertain and through my painted surfaces memories are recorded and transformed. Modest in scale and subject, my works become fleeting moments of distorted reality.

Examining ideas of existence and being, I look for the essence of a person through the essence of an object. The camera becomes a link between an intense description of the world of things and my own response to it. My works are fragments that act like poetic signs; I would like to encourage people to slow down and to see the poetry of everyday life. Through the process of cumulative observation some of my favourite motifs are endlessly copied while others, once pushed to the edge, simply vanish. The diversity of my work unites the idea of looking behind what is seen, which is my main concern.

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Photo: In-ruins

I was impressed about Benedyka's concept of memory: the impossibility of identically replicating two photos, after all, what forces us to do, if not starting with a redefinition of the perceived, revising the signifier associated with a memory, to a single fragment to the extent that the deceptive and misleading memory arbitrarily returns us in relation to what we have seen?

In the painting "Knife on the Table" (Oil on Wood, 2016), reinforcing the concept of contact emphasized by the icastic encounter of surfaces, the dimensional connections are grasped, just like the knife that cuts the eye in the short film “Un chien Andalou” (Luis Bunuel 1929), the surrealistic translation of a visual expression that becomes reality capable of projecting us to a higher level of perception. Similarly, bringing out the boundary between conscious and unconscious, the artist gives shape to a dividing line to stare the memory as an absolute sign.

Text: Ivan Bissoli