Valerio Carrubba
Project Room
Opening: Wednesday, 26 September, 6 pm
Exhibition: 26 September to 17 November 2012
In the Project Room we will show new paintings by the Italian artist Valerio Carrubba, born in Siracusa in 1975.
Valerio Carrubba’s practice is rooted in the paradoxical relation between himself and the modern flux of images: through a process of affectionate collection and obsessive modification, the artist exhausts and negates the image and our possibilities for interaction with it.
The core of the artist’s practice is represented by his paintings, whose starting point is a found image, reworked by the artist to achieve a more pathetic and melodramatic result. Valerio Carrubba’s attention is often focused on XIX Century anatomy manuals’ illustrations and antique portraits, that are chosen and reworked by the artist to be dramatized with the adding or changing of details, colours and context.
After this process of selection, the image is painted on a steel box. The industrial appearance of the support is mirrored in the anti-romantic process in which the work is executed: the whole painting is in fact painted twice, one layer covering the other. Valerio Carrubba constantly reworks the image, “lives” with it, until he feels that it has reached its peak of exhaustion. By doing this, the artist negates any romantic approach on the image obtained, negates its original context but also any possible signifier. Every detail is treated by its own, as for the artist any layer of paint just exists through a replication of signs. By doing this, the final image communicates nothing else that itself in all its precision.
It is through a process of “discovery”, when the work’s process details are communicated, that the viewer realizes the need to explain every visual input through a meaning, labelling it in relation to its context and its corollary. By deliberately challenging and negating this possibility, the artist investigates the ability of the image to stand by itself.
Through repetition or pointless visualization, Valerio Carrubba exploits commonly-found but potentially evocative images to transform them into something different, to recreate their lost identity, to reinvent one; at the same time, he negates this possibility through paradoxical combinations.
This Fall Valerio Carrubba will take part in the group show “Fuoriclasse” curated by Luca Cerizza at Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan. In 2010 he participated in “Ibrido”, curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and Francesco Garutti, at Pac in Milan, in 2009 at the Praga Biennial and in 2008 at the Triennale di Torino "50 Moons of Saturn" curated by Daniel Birnbaum.
His work has been exhibited at Pianissimo Gallery in Milan (2006, 2009) and at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York (2012).