Stefano Capuzzi

Somma e differenza

November 27, 2010 - January 14, 2011
3.00 – 7.00 pm, closed Sunday

OPENING: Saturday, November 27 at 6.00 pm

Fabio Paris Art Gallery is proud to present Somma e differenza, Stefano Capuzzi’s second solo show here. The exhibition features not only the recent developments in the Brescia artist’s painting, but also his new, unpredictable sculptural work, embodied by the synthetic “flowers” of the series Eppure (2010). Both of these aspects come together under a single theme – that of addition and subtraction, which not only represents Capuzzi’s method of working but also the issues he is most concerned with: the encounter between the material character of painting and the liquid, evanescent nature of the digital dimension, between horror vacui and the irreducible urge for simplification, between the order of his method and the destructuring influences of his cultural references - from twelve-tone music to post-modern literature - but above all between the complexity of modern life and the rigour of modernism, which for him is nothing other than the attempt to reconstruct the world “per via di levare” – namely by taking something away - thus bringing forth its underlying structures.
Capuzzi’s painting is usually accomplished in two stages. The first takes place in front of the computer, and consists in delving into a photographic image to bring its underlying structures to the surface, by means of a process of manipulation and vectorization which is in some ways comparable to the Surrealists’ frottage or 1960s décollage. Transformed into a complex, stratified interweave of transparencies and overlaps, abstract patterns and the sudden reappearance of a recognisable form, the image is transferred onto canvas in the form of a digital print. Capuzzi then paints on this canvas, this time by addition, with unexpected and imaginative results. Despite the complexity of his modus operandi, the result is extremely unified, and the various processes are only visible on close examination. In his most recent works, however, Capuzzi introduces another variant, accompanying the linear rigour and flatness of vector graphics with the imperfections and depth of bitmap imagery, often in low resolution.
This continuous interplay between method and creative freedom, order and chaos, also emerges in his sculptures, “flowers” that Capuzzi creates by mounting, in some of the infinite possible combinations, sheets of polycarbonate cut into three different formats created by deformation from a single form and hand-painted in bright colours. Stunning and perverse, these “flowers” are a further outcome of Capuzzi’s interest in combinatory art and his detached dialogue with minimalism. Only apparently contradicted, this fundamental chapter in contemporary sculpture is a necessary reference for Capuzzi, with its work on seriality (Sol LeWitt) and the “antiformalist” nature of folds (Robert Morris), which reintroduces elements of complexity into order, and the unpredictability of the organic world into the geometry of the inorganic.