Carlo Alfano
On Friday, the 15th of April at 7.00 p.m., Studio Trisorio, Riviera di Chiaia 215 in Naples, will inaugurate an exhibit of Carlo Alfano’s works entitled The Fullness of Absence. The exhibit features large scale works realized during the decade between 1980-1990.
The constant tension in all of Alfano’s works generates an impulse to self-examination, to ponder the meaning of representation, of paintings and, in a more philosophical sense, of human existence.
In his works, “temporality” is intended as a form of self-examination of duration, much like the quest for an open space which separates our inner-selves from others. This theme is central in the Eco-Narciso, Eco-Discesa and Figure cycles which are part of the works exhibited in the show.
In Eco-Narciso, the artist isolates the figure of Narcissus and, irrespective of the hedonistic, self–complacent image in mythology, attempts to capture the exact moment in which, admiring his own reflection, his figure separates into another, lost beyond the boundaries of space and time.
Indeed, duplicity is the underlying concept in the works of Alfano, as is evident in the broken figures in Eco-Discesa, his first cycle which dates back to the Eighties. In this work, double is never intended as a sum, but rather as a condition of ambiguity in which reality and its reflection are at play with everything vacillating between these two dimensions. Like an echo, it reverberates far beyond its source of origin yet it cannot exist without a source: thus in the painting, the two detached parts cannot act autonomously. The work’s reoccurring black space gives a visible form to the concept of depth with a human figure appearing on an unfathomable threshold. The slit canvas appears to indicate the disassemblage of an individual which has subsequently been recomposed and closely stitched with wire.
The individual’s scission and loss of centrality are also featured in the subsequent Figure cycle where the bodies are specularly split in two, are divided and are frequently viewed from behind in the act of crossing over a metaphorical threshold until dematerialising in densely coloured spaces of all-enveloping grey, saturated blue.
The exhibit will remain open to the public until the 3rd of June, 2016.