The solo show Gaspare Works / Words 2008 / 2012 presents various series of works by the young Italian artist and critic, some of them exhibited previously, others on show for the first time.

In the cycle Opera (2008-2012), the artist creates square “black canvases”, stratifying homogeneous materials (oils, tempera, charcoal, ink, acrylics etc.) to which he adds the ashes of his own works burnt earlier. The same process is adopted in the series of rectangular canvases entitled Art Notes (2011-2012), in which the ash he uses derives from sheets of his own creative and historical-critical notes.

In the new series Ostrakon (2010-2012), the artist has incised his own name on small fragments of black-painted terracotta, a metaphor for the solitude and fragility of man and his works.

The works on paper from the series Gaspare (2011-2012) are obtained by the writing and the subsequent “overwriting” of his name hundreds of times, turning the paper onto each of its four sides, thus generating through stratification and weaving, a "simple" tangle of black ink. The writing simultaneously negates and regenerates itself through the self-annulment of the subject.

Corpus Vitrearum (2012) is another previously unseen series, this time composed of numerous glass bottles; each bottle contains the ashes of a work of art, either on canvas or paper, as ever created via the process of stratifying homogeneous materials, together with the black water produced during the creation of the work itself. A new chemical and physical harmony, the “essence” of the process and the work.

The cubes from the series Brain (2012, each approximately 11x11x11 cm), allude to the volume of the human brain, an idea of thought and its “energy”, of the construction/destruction of thought and creative processes; one version is in “charred” wood, another in wax, a cubic candle that destroys (or transforms) itself as it burns.

Gaspare’s research, with the complementary use of traditional techniques and materials and everyday, found objects, opens a dialectical confrontation with the history of art, culture and science, basing itself in part on the idea of a cyclical relationship between being and the void, the destruction and regeneration of forms and matter. As well as the idea of metamorphosis, through the use of fire, ashes and the practice of stratification, his work also expresses a material and metaphorical synthesis of his own and historical and collective memory. Time is the protagonist in the creative action. The almost obsessive choice of black – the material synthesis of all colours – is bound up with the idea of the void, of enigma and the absolute expressed through what is probably the only true non-colour. An active and cyclical nihilism, open to reflections on the context of our contemporaneity.

The catalogue to the exhibition, published by SabinaMelesiEdizioni, will feature the artist’s reflections, a critical text by Giorgio Bonomi and a conversation between the artist and Chiara Gatti.

Gaspare Luigi Marcone (Terlizzi-Bari 1983; lives in Milan, Italy). An artist and curator, following a period of study at the Goethe Universität of Frankfurt (D), he graduated in Art History and Criticism from the University of Milan (2006) where he has also worked in the Department of Art History (2007-2010). He has published academic articles and critical texts and has curated exhibitions of artists such as Bernd & Hilla Becher, Irma Blank, Erik Dietman, Gilbert & George, Piero Manzoni, Roman Opalka, Claudio Parmiggiani, Anne and Patrick Poirier, Eva Sørensen, David Tremlett and others. He curated the monographic exhibition of Anne and Patrick Poirier The Garden of Memory. Project for a contemporary necropolis at the Museo MADRE in Naples (2011). He contributes to art and contemporary culture periodicals including Artribune, Nuova Meta and Titolo.

Solo shows:
-Gaspare Works/Words 2008/2012, catalogue with text by G. Bonomi, conversation between the artist and C. Gatti, Galleria Melesi, Lecco, 2012
-Gaspare - Logos, Raffaella De Chirico - Galleria d’Arte, Turin, 2011-2012
-Gaspare - Opera Prima, catalogue with text by the artist and presentation by S. Givone, Lakeside Art Gallery, Verbania, 2010
Group shows:
-Statement, curated by N. F. Davenport, Lakeside Art Gallery, Verbania, 2012
-Linea Mentis – Irma Blank, Eva Sørensen, Gaspare, catalogue with text by G. Lamoni, Raffaella De Chirico - Galleria d’Arte, Turin, 2011
-Superfici Attive, catalogue with text by the curator of the exhibition A. Comino, Galleria Spaziotemporaneo, Milan, 2011

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