Carlo Guaita — Archeologica — Bernard Bouche Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 4 → March 25, 2017

The Galerie Bernard Bouche is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works by Carlo Guaita, Archeologica, starting from the February 4. In his work the Italian artist (born in Palermo in 1954) subtly navigates us through a sculpture (in cement, in stone or in cardboard), a painting or books through a lexical grammar which relates to the titles of the series he works on for a few years now, like Dagherrotipi, Orizzonte, I Colassati, Universo Appeso…

These are sometimes the titles from small booklets which the artist publishes almost every year, the last one being Paesaggi residuali. As explains Denis Viva in his text Carottages, the research of Guaita confronts the monochrome painting and the landscape, the latter being understood as an antagonism, but also as a substrate generator. In these various aspects, the artist creates a continuous stratification, almost an archiving, as with this series of works on paper — collage, photography and ink, under the title Paesaggi residuali. In the series Dagherrotipi or Pozzi, for example, there are monochrome paintings of small dimensions, made with a material as simple as possible (as always does the artist), passing it back and forth to the infinite with the support of a diluted colour on the final transparent varnish. The colour is not extended, but left to the horizontal sedimentation. Viewed from a distance, the Dagherrotipi appear flat and reflective so that, seen in the proximity, they reveal to be absorbent, saturated and deep. Again, we quote Denis Viva : «Often, but not always, black made his appearance. Its intensity is so high that it lets us perceive a presence more than an absence. This should be a total absence of light, but, paradoxically, it has its own power of emanation. Sometimes it is because of a saturation, of a tracing, of a pressing, of a tearing. In all cases, there is an absence achieved by the stratification […] Under the layer of black, like a kind of over-writing, sometimes there are illustrations. Guaita never chooses them randomly, although they are part of a very broad repertoire from which they come out with just a dose of indifference […] These are tables of the iconography of the Lumières, whose roots are to be found in the books and the illustrations of the Encyclopedia, from the XVIII century until our days […] Elements of a table, data, sentences on which the pigment is superimposed, reiterating the same mechanism for the depth/opacity. They are separate and united at the same time. One perceives their stratification, but the ink connects them ideally and technically, as components of a single and unique paradoxical project […] He seeks ultimately to drive the painting to its definitive fulfillment."