Artist: Enrico Della Torre
Exhibition title: Cut Outs Paintings
Venue: Galería Alegría, Barcelona, Spain
Date: September 15 – October 30, 2021
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galería Alegría, Barcelona
Galería Alegría presents “Cut Out Paintings”, the new exhibition by Enrico Della Torre (Tradate, 1988). The artist, from Italy, expands his research on the limits of painting by introducing new elements into his language, and questioning his own work dynamic.
As in previous exhibitions, Della Torre’s pieces examine the boundaries and potential of the pictorial space, as well as the elements that are present and latent in the work. His style revolves around a possible degree zero of painting, and he looks into the relationship between gesture and structure, exploring the dialectic between expressive calligraphical lines and near-minimalist planes of black graphite.
However, the works brought together for this exhibition broaden out the artist’s registers of composition, by incorporating fragments of discarded and unfinished works from the last two years. By being manipulated, sewn and juxtaposed, these scraps and offcuts have helped open up new avenues of development in the artist’s most recent output. The different layers form new compositional spaces, casting light and toning down shadows, thereby enriching Della Torre’s language. In this process of workshop archaeology, the painter calls himself into question, allowing irony, playfulness and self-critique to form an active part of the creative process.
In “Cut Out Paintings” we see, therefore, that ample and abstract surfaces give way to organic forms; we see how new lines and distinct silhouettes emerge, and a surprising aesthetic vocabulary arises, which embraces accidents and waste without any hesitation. The pieces invite the spectator to think about what elements a work of art should contain, what the limits of painterly language are, and what happens when this language, reduced to a minimum, undergoes a process of cutting, combining and recycling.
Enrico Della Torre is thus following a highly personal path, in which respect for the essential elements of painting coexists, naturally, with his questioning of the established discourses, and with the unabashed reflection upon the ideal modus operandi of truly contemporary painting.
