Passi perduti passi ripresi

Renata Fabbri arte contemporanea is pleased to present Passi perduti passi ripresi, a solo exhibition of works by Italian artist Luigi Carboni.

For his first exhibition with the gallery the artist has developed a narrative project, where the traditional boundary between lyrical abstraction and everyday figuration, as well as the one between decorative and intimist style are challenged, with the aim of leading the pictorial subject to its deepest essence.

Broad oil and acrylic paintings, defined as “fearless and unbridled”, have been placed beside smaller ones. The works on display feature dominant black-and-whites, together with an acidic and transparent “alphabet of colours”, sometimes opaque and marginal, sometimes rich in dark reflections.

The pictorial space is inhabited by countless images, signs, and seemingly incomplete shapes: natural motifs, landscapes, places, portraits of bodies, figures and spectres coexist on the canvas in a group narrative. “Everything is there, before our very eyes”.

The form oscillates on the edge between decoration, baroque sensuousness, vigorous expressiveness and hallucinated photorealism: here, the invention takes on the typical traits of a conceptual reflection.

On the painted surface fissures, round holes, circles akin to lenses, flawlessly carved celestial bodies materialise in a deceptive manner, endlessly dismantling and reassembling the mutilated forms. Carboni is not depicting an “outside”, but an “inside”. He is evoking the mirrored image of reality, instead of reality itself.

The exhibition includes several sculptures realised by the artist, “nude objects” which are the direct result of the pictorial process.

All the works presented, irrespective of the different codes adopted by the artist, symbolise an art of many united opposites and create the paradox of a reciprocal and simultaneous dialectic shot through with a sense of interrogation.

The fragmented yet uniform nature of the exhibition is a comprehensive portrayal of our time: a combination of opposites which coexist in their diversity, with all the consequent uncertainties and contradictions. Carboni does not disavow the time in which he is living: actually he is aware that the present is our only reality. He is convinced that “all contemporary painting of significant relevance is basically conceptual”.