Opening Saturday 21 July 2012, 6 pm
Exhibition: 21 July - 1 September 2012
We are pleased to announce the first exhibition in Switzerland by the Italian painter Gianluca Di Pasquale.
His first works on canvas were landscape paintings composed almost only by figures, painted with precise brush strokes inside a large white space. Apart from some people, a few trees, some architectural details, there was nothing but white canvas. Yet in the imagination the immaculate space becomes mountains, sea, a square or a street. The scenarios are those of our leisure time: ski slopes, parks, trails, large urban squares, beaches - places of encounter and mediation between nature and civilization, where people aggregate, creating rhythms and constellations dictated by the forms of the landscape.
In some more recent works the female figure becomes the main actor of the scene. But these mysterious women are shown from behind, making it impossible to ascertain their identity. We thus find ourselves observing a series of backs of women wearing garments with floral or abstract motifs. The further we delve into these intricate textures, the more we find ourselves immersed in an unknown, abstract pictorial landscape.
Immaculate white returns as a characteristic feature of Di Pasquale’s compositions, ready to host the female bodies and floral elements in an absolute, delicate space. This operation itself becomes painting. The white canvas is transformed into the scenario in which the figures orbit, captured in the banality of everyday gestures, seemingly intent upon a sort of cosmic soliloquy. At the same time, as often in Di Pasquale’s paintings, it’s the persons who create the space, and even the landscape.
In his most recent paintings, developed after a journey to Vietnam, the artist evokes some atmospheres typical of Indochine, in the way he has always imagined it. Echos of the imagination and pre-existing images combine with recent memories. The landscapes are seen as in a daydream. Nearly always starting with a photographic image, that he uses as daily notes, Di Pasquale re-creates with painting images pre-existing in his own imagination.
Gianluca Di Pasquale was born in Rome in 1971. He lives and works in Milano.