Artists: Cristiano Carotti, Rune Elgaard, Marco Eusepi, Vincenzo Simone
Exhibition title: SELVATICO
Curated by: Eleonora Aloise, Carlo Maria Lolli Ghetti
Venue: White Noise Gallery, Rome, Italy
Date: June 4 – July 25, 2021
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and White Noise Gallery, Rome
“Pioneers of an Homeric journey that will always, inevitably, bring them back to the starting point.”
The figure of the artist is able to reflect the spirit of its time while contributing to its definition.
Yet, sometimes, art’s timing can be in open contrast with the frenzy and unpredictability of social dynamics. During these cycles, some artists defend their own living space by moving away from the context to get back to an almost primordial and untamed status.
These artists are focusing their entire research on the pursuit of perfection. They’re not following the impossible goal of reaching Kurtz; the act of slowly sailing up the river is precisely what powers their existences. Their life takes place in studios and not in cafés, they study Morandi instead of Dalì, they speak about the artworks and not about their meanings. Their main relationships are established with pigment and dirt, with the canvas and the furnace.
These artists are looking towards the future while respecting the past; their artworks are destined to exceed styles since they’re built over what has already survived the judgment of time. They’re not quoting but they’re not frightened to recall; novelty for them is always a by-product, never an obsession. They’re not playing a role in the “return of” but they’re the keepers of an ancient practice fighting against a frenzied generation. Their battle is against mermaids named: immediacy, absoluteness and ephemerality.
For this category of artists “how” comes before “what” and the action is as important as the image. The choice of the subjects is a direct consequence of the creative process: they’re not pretexts but opportunities in the exploration of a particular practice. Using a specific colour to portrait a flower, synthetizing a landscape with a gesture, glorifying clay’s plasticity through the shape of a beehive. Nature, being an absolute and time-crossing language, gets its key role back. Not “a” subject but “the” subject, which is able to establish the uniqueness of its author exactly through infinite repetition.
The studio of these artists is a temple where they live in a trance state established by an unnatural time rhythm. Creating the artwork becomes an automatic process that they are only allowed to begin. They are often surprised by their own creations in a subverted relationship where the artwork tells more about the artist than the opposite. The time spent far from the studio generates a hunger that can only be fed by an obsessive and cannibalistic effort of constant improvement of their practice. Mixing, shaping, glazing become as basic as breathing.
Cristiano Carotti, Rune Elgaard, Marco Eusepi and Vincenzo Simone all belong to this rank of soldiers.
Carotti’s ceramic beehives slowly grow over car parts as if they were urban conglomerates. They end up blocking them in a counterrevolutionary gesture where the nature reaffirms its position as metronome over modernity.
Rune Elgaard paints visual compositions recalling both DADA collages and an Instagram feed trompe-l’oeil. The juxtaposition of images apparently disconnected evokes new, open and ambiguous scenarios to the viewer.
The familiar but still unrecognizable landscapes painted by Marco Eusepi are only following his gesture. Points, lines and surfaces become lakes, roads and fields; only suggested by hints of colour but still perfectly depicted in their essence.
Vincenzo Simone’s still lives enclose the entire evolution of painting, polarized between his canvasses and paper sheets. As it happens with black holes they become dense enough to bend time.
They are four performers using different medias to protect the same ascetic idea of the artist; constantly struggling to satisfy a need that is more physical and instinctual than intellectual. Pioneers of an Homeric journey that will always, inevitably, bring them back to the starting point.
