University Campus Suffolk

2014

CRAFTY DENSITY

One week to the degree show. So many things have happened. Failures and heart aches. Pain and hardship. All in all, the three tumultuous years at UCS are about to come to an end. You think that the competition is dry, this is an adventure for everyone. In the last 2 months I have tried my best to be attentive to the work that is about to be unveiled at the degree show. This is a glorious event which can only be celebrated now. I want it to be the best show I have done so far. So I have put all my energy into it. There are works here I want to feel free to show. These are not works that should stay in the basement. I have dedicated a lot of time and isolation, most importantly they are my new works and they are perfumed with splendour, a nightmarish splendour, maybe uneasy to grasp.

Because originally I come from a sad country, there’s not much to be discovered other than a surplus of happiness and a psychedelic folklore. My poor country – a satire made of gypsies and vagabonds. Vampires of the 21^st century. I travel emotionally. I dismantle my senses. I see the decadence, the sex and the corruption of capitalism. Not really grown up as I like to think of myself I came to the conclusion that I am very vulnerable to these perceptions. In the way that I am progressing in art like in Super Mario World. Throwing cabbage at everyone. ‘I feel like Van Gogh vs Darth Vader. The Jacques Cousteau of this abyss. Giving it my best. I am the craftsman. I am becoming The Artist.’

In the arrangement process of my degree show ‘The Forest’ I refer to Joyce Pensato’s exhibition at Lisson Gallery I had the pleasure of seeing last month in London, emphasising on a loose space, a series of benign canvases and an overall expressive gentleness. In the same feeling with Joyce I present my space as an open ‘studio / working environment’ as my tutor David Baldry would pin it. Leaving evidence of me working like maybe some brushes or something half finished. You won’t really know what’s finished work or not. You can touch the object and interact with the work physically, like playing a game of Noughts and Crosses. There are shelves at different levels where I have placed a collection of paintings and sculptures, some are on their side and stacked up to show that they are past work, while other work could be in progress or finished. I think it’s really important to show this feature leaving expectations to a viewer.

I prefer other unruly allocations of spaces like Oscar Murrilo’s show ‘If I was to draw a line this journey started approximately 400km North of the Equator’

?Chaos, what is usually installed into a space, like thrown into a space almost. I think its different approach to the relations of aesthetics, to what this show might fit in.? – a visitor.

BETWEEN THE PHYSICAL AND THE UNPERCEIVABLE

After a visit to the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 I experienced Marc Quinn’s gigantic inflatable sculpture of a disembodied women gazing with purple eyes over the water from the not so distant island overlooking St Mark’s Square. From the opposite shore I had not realised it was inflatable. It seemed to be carved in marble. Getting closer I discovered its absence of solidity in the air pumping fan fabric statue. I was seduced by it and I became interested in making an inflatable myself. Working with different materials and juxtaposing them constantly demonstrates how my work fluctuates in medium. I employ wavelengths of colour to create the unpredictable. ‘Invisible Column’ is a monumental flimsy sculpture. It is about intangibility and the romantic nature of the unseen in the immateriality of the material itself. Aware there is more to this work than what meets the eye I found myself in a very soft and flexible wobbly warp. The work is witty and complex, challanging the very definition of sculpture. There is nothing carved in stone nor wood, no casting metal nor plaster, unlike a Brancusi it opens up like a Pandora’s box. ‘Invisible Column’ takes you on a journey around the mathematical elongations of my restless young mind.

The work evolved in little steps. Seeing other artists’ work and going to exhibitions ideas eventually started to grow in my mind. Although I have realised it’s not only what I see that makes me think but also what I don’t see. There are incredible possibilities in the invisible. So when I imagine something that is not there already, I think to myself this must be new. And when I build an object with my hands I have progress in mind. When I decide I am going to put it in a gallery space I have a resolution. This object is not only showing the progress and the resolution of my practice but also the invisible side. Attached is my working spirit and the magic. Ritualistically like a magician I make the material disappear applying colour to it. The material vanishes. It ceases to exist. It becomes invisible. I make it reappear again through colour, it challenges the formal historical provenance of the material – the work is already something else, it has been modified, mutated, metamorphosed and sufficiently simplified.

Considering the craft of historical sculpture such as Michelangelo’s ‘David’, in this work that aspect is left intentionally aside. I feel that today‘s art is undergoing a dramatic practical change and my artistic pretence is to dismantle the process of invention working with it at the same time. A good example of a contemporary artist that shares this philosophy is Martin Creed. In his recent exhibition ‘What’s the point of it?’ at the Hayward Gallery London in 2014. Creed’s evaluation of the world resumes in simple creative moments. Like Creed, my work proliferates a sculptural chronotope exploring time and space, history and the future. I am constantly on the search, shape shifting and dream catching my ideas.

In ‘Mr. E’ I am inventing a head from tiny hybrid shapes. The head is disappearing and forming like an identity cocktail. This is my turbulent visual grammar – disturbing, compulsive and floral.

Another example is the alert reality envisaged in ‘Midnight Rambler’ a painting that captures the wild life – tribal, sophisticated and primordial.