Eduard Habicher - Antonello Viola
Solo Show
06.30.2018
Eduard Habicher was born in 1956 in Mals in the Vinschgau and studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. He now lives and works in Riffian near Meran.
Antonello Viola was born in Rome in 1966. In 1989 he gained a diploma in art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Since 1995 he has been teaching decorative arts and techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. He lives and works in Rome.
… Modernity’s central notion of sculpture, penetrating space or being penetrated by space and thereby releasing, distorting, concentrating or dissolving its energy, is endowed with a new dynamic in Habicher’s art. He translates the format of the essential parameters of sculpture such as weight, balance, statics, stability and volume into his defining theme, the juxtaposition of weight and lightness, of movement and space, of floating and falling. Like knotted strings, the curving and swaying H-beam steel strips or oval tubes unleash a potential for movement as well as a stylistic language, which is as expressive and gestural as informal painting. They jut out from the wall, they link up separate areas, they nestle on the wall, they serve as a supports for pieces of scorched wood, or are randomly placed in a disjointed fashion; yet at times, the shadow they cast is as important as the sculptural body itself. Frequently they are given linguistically playful names and they always taunt us, playing on our fear that they might topple over.
(Heinrich Schwazer)
In his works on canvas, paper or glass, Antonello Viola traces a chromatic perimeter where, through a process of accumulation, stratification and sedimentation, the canvas becomes a place devoted to meditation and the research of the absolute. The artist converts invisible into visible with thin layers of paint that are then scraped, removed and deleted. The painting's quiet surface is animated by signs that reveal what lies underneath, the deep, pulsating matter that ultimately gives shape to the work. The artist's visual experiences and the memory of them are absorbed by this process of stratification and sublimated in the colour layers. Through the material density of his work, Viola establishes a new relationship with space, a renewed dialogue between the inner dimension of the work and the environment that surrounds it, in which the artist does not act instinctively or empirically, but moves from a specific project.
This simple shape is intended to hold the colour in its perimeter, a fence whose boundaries are instead constantly exceeded by the vibrating energy of the act of painting. Viola establishes a new relationship with the modern tradition of monochrome painting, where the reduction of the pictorial vocabulary corresponds to a positive and constructive understanding of the world, which perception is renewed through the energy of colour. His most recent works have been characterised by the use of quite varied materials: Japanese paper, glass, gold leaf and oil pigments; single and multiple formats which are presented in careful compositions.
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