In Cerca di Cielo e Terra:
Searching for Heaven and Earth
Galleria Il Pozzo, Cortona
Each of the previous exhibitions have been inspired by a similar theme and this one is no exception. We live between two worlds. At every moment, I find myself somewhere in the continuum between the divine and the mundane, in movement towards something of a higher order or towards my every day habits and obsessions. The variations on this theme are endless.
The paintings and drawings are an exploration. First, an exploration into painting itself, how color and gesture become a mysterious manifestation of creation. It is also an exploration into the unknown of making, how the act itself of painting is a lens to an inner world normally lying in darkness. It is a process of self-discovery by turns exhilarating and frightening.
Finally it is an exploration of an ever present movement between two worlds, a search for a greater awareness of where I am, how I am, who I am in this search. The subject is simply a point of departure. The first exhibition grew from one of the most powerful renderings of this movement by Il Rossi Fiorentino: the deposition of Christ, Himself a representation of both the divine and the human, at the precise moment of being lowered to the earth and ascending to heaven. The drawings attempt to reveal something in the different ways we receive this impression from a call to the task at hand to a grief of great loss. The second exhibition, with the hands from the paintings of Caravaggio, tried to reveal how in drawing a form or image can mysteriously begin to appear simply out of marks on a paper. The third, grounded in renderings of a single place, Piazza della Repubblica, layers the impressions to release our habitual tendency to reduce the world to our single idea of it. Instead, one view interpenetrates another and another, evoking the real richness of our memories and experience as vastly multidimensional.
This current exhibition takes the narrow streets of Cortona and is inspired by the relationships between the profile of the street and the profile of the sky against the animated roofs.
Most importantly, I hope they delight and inspire.