After years of making rigorously abstract paintings.

After years of making rigorously abstract paintings, Luigi Carboni here not past nor futureed a group of very different works: paintings filled with drawn images of clearly recognizable ends The new works do however have relation with his paintings of 1985-87 where he explored gesturing albeit with a clear desire to betray the conventions of gestural abstraction. Carboni has continually sought to combine his preeminent interest in painting with a conceptual approach to art-making, a suit which continued in this show

In the strange paintings, which generally measure 5 by way of 6 feet the images are made on lines and marks nervously scratched into a dark, frequently black, surface. As these lines score the surface, they reveal a layer of white underpainting. by means of the open drawing style of this two-tone way Carboni moves away from the bleak mechanical language of his immediately preceding work. His modern expressivity is accompanied by respects to such elemental subjects as skeletons and sex The 1995 painting con over Un Sorriso (With a Smile) is filled with sketches of human skeletons in various artificial positions Interspersed with the skeletons are disembodied craniums and schematic depictions of female genitalia. In another work, Paesaggio (Landscape), a brain-pan and skeleton motif is combined with a densely drawn floral pattern. In these works, as in others, Carboni uses the surface of the painting to explore the tension between impulse and order, between distinct gesturings and allover composition. Looking carefully at these blackened, tarnished canvases single in kind becomes keenly aware of the multiple layers of image and of meaning.

This display suggests that even when it was principally abstract, Carboni's artistic discourse was not at all centered on the subject of painting itself. He is more interested in what Demetrio Paparoni, speaking about Carboni, has called "sacrality." As Carboni's painting has deflected toward more "primitive" content, this sacred aspect has become more evident. At the same time, the stratified surfaces of his canvases have taken onward an uncertain physicality that present the appearances appropriate to our time.

...

Home