Duo.4


 
Fausto Bertasa

PietroFinelli

Duo.4

 

Opening Tuesday, February 12 at 18
Otto luogo dell’arte
Via Maggio 13 r

until March 5, 2013

Otto Luogo dell’Arte continues its programme with a show by two Italian artists, Fausto Bertasa and Pietro Finelli.
In Duo, Bertasa e Finelli are at the cutting edge of an attitude which is, in painting as cult(ure), an effective instrument for protest, in an antimodernist sense, not as mere political gesture, but qualifying itself in a full, complex participation in our time. The main task is to abandon all routes that keep to inductive classification systems, which were a reference to formal, content-based logics, to methodological alliances to physical and mental expressive organs, which typified and even saturated artistic practices in the last century.
This manner of working painting comes out through a careful reexamination of painting in its paradigms, in its plural self-interrogation of its origins and renewed relationship to place.
Their belonging refers to the work as means of reorganizing meaning, and as a starting point for a condensed plethora of philosophical viewpoints, starting from the painting itself and returning to it after an elliptical trip through the various logical/experiential topoi of the modern period. The painting remains an absolute logical/experiential topos, in its effective representative realism, since mondernist logic has understood and lightly incised upon the form/content dichotomy’s meaning, with all its amusing and infinite thematic variations, forgetting the anthropological, philosophical and imaginational meaning which paintings possess to the highest degree.
For Bertasa, this descent occurs in the most typical territories of people, merchandise, contracts, travel, in a search behind the words, images and signs of a dialogue and a universe, like a modern Leskovian traveler, which leads to substantiation in a rigorous, dry, refined style of painting, which doesn’t tell, but becomes (is) a hyper-acute experiential locus of anthropo-mnemonic footnotes, an absolute space in its own time, where painting, freed of its ballast of postmodernist narratives, has its physical interaction with Reality.
For Finelli, painting places itself into a cinematic imaginative space, with a decidedly noir tint, but only to liberate a tangency that, in painting as in cinema, has, in its view and vision, a moment of crisis and introspection, an absolute moment of a modernity – a contemporary modernity, this time – which renders painting its absolute paradigm. The refinement of his painterly line – an echo of the French and Flemish schools – enters into a dialogue with masters from the past, and, in its ability to produce a style of painting which not only imposes itself on space but which generates space itself.
In this way, painting, interpreted by Bertasa and Finelli, tries to refresh a meaning and a dialogue with topoi that are canyon-pits of the real, embracing an ideal continuity with the great masters of classical painting, from Masaccio, Durer, Raffaello, Vermeer and Goya, up to the lessons of Degas, Manet and Cezanne, for whom painting asserted itself as a logical-philosophical moment intended as a sharp gaze into the problematics of the world.

Pietro Finelli (1957) artist and curator, lives and works in Milan. He has shown his work in galleries, museums and international institutions such as Gallery MC in New York, Il Ponte Contemporanea Roma, Galleria Pack Milano, Museo Castel Nuovo Napoli, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Mamco) Geneva, Fundation F.J.Klemm Buenos Aires, Galerie Jacques Cerami Charleroi, VELAN Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea di Torino.

Fausto Bertasa (1953) artist, lives and works in Bergamo.

2001: New York, “Mouse Pad” Egizio’s Project;

2002: in Bellinzona, “Fe-male” CACT – Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Ticino (a cura di Mario Casanova e Marco Tagliaferro);

2005: in Bergamo, “Quadrato per la ricerca” GAMeC (a cura di Nadia Ghisalberti, Donato Losa, Attilio Pizzigoni, cat.);

2006: in Varese, “Fair trade organization” Duetart Gallery;

2007: in Milan, “ctm” Camelot; in Milan, “Happy Birthday Careof 1987-2007” c/o Careof – Fabbrica del vapore; in Settimo Torinese “Profumo di cacao” Cioccolato come arte” Casa dell’arte e dell’architettura “La Giardiniera” (Cat. a cura di Marisa Vescovo);

2008: in Bergamo “Antologia” Jade Art Gallery (a cura di Sara Mazzocchi, cat.); in Roma “Experimenta” Collezione Farnesina – Ministero degli Affari Esteri ( curated by Maurizio Calvesi, Lorenzo Canova, Marco Meneguzzo, Marisa Vescovo, Cat.)

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