Orizzonte Variabile (Variable Horizon)
by Andrea Chiesi 22 april 16 - 15 june 16 2016
At Spazio Arte, the new Orizzonte Variabile by Modenese artist Andrea Chiesi, a draughtsman and painter who is one of the most interesting figures in the latest generation of Italian artists.
The exhibition, curated by Claudio Musso, attempts to trace an anthological path through Andrea Chiesi’s many years of artistic research and production. This artist began painting the contemporary urban landscape in the late 1990s, focusing on the suburbs, industrial areas, brownfield sites and infrastructures. His friend, the writer and musician Emidio Clementi, in the story In Barca from the book Periferie Viaggio ai margini delle città’ (‘Suburbs, Journey to the edge of cities’). (edited by Stefania Scateni, Pub. Laterza, 2006) calls Chiesi “an expert on suburbs”, becoming, in his own right, their greatest artistic interpreter.
Residential and commercial buildings, factories, gasometers, roads and bridges shape the visual field of Andrea Chiesi’s paintings, while the succession of geometric volumes and the continuous openings and closures of visual perspective mark the rhythm of observation. The stylistic elements that distinguish the artist’s works are theprevailing black and white and the particular shade of grey that determine the cold, metallic light of the paintings, togetheralong with the study of contrasts, mirroring and reflections.
The suburbs and the urban landscape thus represent the central theme of Chiesi’s art. Through the rigorous, meditative and meticulous pictorial phase, he shifts the outlying and marginal areas of the urban fabric onto the canvas, where they lose their social and political connotations becoming mental places and silent spaces of solitude and contemplation of reality.
Moreover, as Claudio Musso writes in his introduction to the catalogue: “in the urban and metropolitan panorama, suburbs and horizon are inextricably linked concepts where the landscape becomes the place assigned for talking about people without necessarily representing them, it becomes a pretext for going beyond, opening up another world where all places leave the realm of time“.
A selection of oil-on-linen works are on display , from the La Casa (2004) series, whose subject is the space outside Chiesi’s home-studio, and the Kriptoi (2007) series dedicated to the Ex Manifatture Tabacchi in Milan and Modena. From the Perpetuum (2011) cycle of paintings portraying various abandoned places in Berlin, created with the photographer Paola Verde. Again, from the Ucronie (2013) series inspired by places that appear abandoned and suspended in time, to the latest Karma series (2015), with a more significant component and numerous details, including the two paintings created specifically for this exhibition and dedicated to the architecture of Pilastro, a district in the north-eastern outskirts of Bologna.
Andrea Chiesi, Perpetuum 5, 2011, oil on linen, cm 35×50. Private collection.
Andrea Chiesi, Perpetuum 17, 2011, oil on linen, cm 35×50. Private collection.
Andrea Chiesi, Ucronie 43, 2014, oil on linen.
Andrea Chiesi, La casa, 2004, oil on linen. Courtesy Otto Gallery, Bologna.
Andrea Chiesi, Favignana, 2015, oil on linen. Coutesy Guidi&Schoen Gallery, Genoa.
Andrea Chiesi, Ucronie 13, 2013, oil on linen. Courtesy Guidi&Schoen Gallery, Genoa.
Andrea Chiesi, Karma 23, 2015, oil on linen. Courtesy Guidi&Schoen Gallery, Genova.
Andrea Chiesi, Karma 19, 2015, oil on linen. Coutesy Guidi&Schoen Gallery, Genoa.
Andrea Chiesi, San Donato, 2016, oil on linen. Unipol Group Artistic Heritage.
The exhibition contributes to the many celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the district’s founding and its social and cultural promotion through a photographic appendix. This is taken from the Digital Community Archive collections curated by LAMINARIE – Cantiere narrazione within the #PrimaveraPilastro2016 Project, promoted by the Municipality of Bologna in partnership with the San Donato District. An original installation of twenty-seven pencil drawings, in which the artist “concentrates on portions of buildings and interior views outlined with a quick but at the same time heavy stroke, completes the selection of works intended to express the idea of suburban places as new cultural milieux from which innovative ferments can arise”. (from the catalogue text by Claudio Musso)
Andrea Chiesi, Pilastro, 2016, oil on linen. Unipol Group Artistic Heritage.
Andrea Chiesi, disegni in grafite, anni ’90, installazione in mostra.
