Pantomima XXX / Alan Stefanato
- exhibition, curator
Associazione Barriera, Turin
11.02.2022 – 13.03.2022
The practice of Alana Stefanato is the result of an autodidactic path outside the main Academies and art schools, and it acts through the medium of painting yet looking beyond it, incorporating other languages over time, such as drawing and sculpture. Stefanato uses the traditional technique of oil painting, which with time led him to conceive different possibilities and solutions. A first period, hallmarked by landscapes inhabited by surreal and grotesque characters, is followed by a secon period distinguished by a more abstract style, made of backgrounds, shapes, colors and sensations, and based on a meticulous process of phenomenal observation of nature and altered mimesis.
The project encompasses a corpus of unpublished works that further develops this line of research, highlighting the expressiveness of the technique, the
pictorial sign and its spontaneous ramification. Painting is reduced to an instinctive act rather than a decorative one: the work session, which can last even up to 12 hours, is never over until the work is completed. The time spent to create a painting is usually quite limited, so that improvisation and discovery are essential features of the production, experienced as a deeply intimate and intense experience.
Pantomima XXX develops from the idea of the frame as a device that suggests an interpretation of the exhibition. The frame, whose function is not only to delimit a canvas, but also to contain the space represented in the painting, in this case performs a more open function. Made in op-art style, combining abstract subjects and colors, the frames’ patterns trigger an unsettling and nauseating
effect that projects the work towards a fourth dimension and fuels a tension between the ideas of belonging and destination, reality and fiction.
As a fil rouge that runs through the entire project, the alternation of black and white is part of a lively and expressive narrative, a pantomime
conceived as a wordless action of theatrical representation. Meanwhile, this alternation establishes a parallelism with the pictorial practice as a silent language made of gestures and movement applied to the canvas. The para-theatrical imagination reveals itself starting from an unrea dialogue between the Moon and Pierrot, a character who lost his slyness and duplicity to
become a melancholic mime who is love with the moon, the same Gilles of the famous painting by Antoine Watteau.
The conversation between Pierrot and the Moon is a crosstalk that follows a succession of paradoxical visions and associations, a surreal and sometimes dreamlike chat. An atmosphere that is reflected especially in the text written by the artist, but also in some of the paintings’ titles – Il lupo non sa contare (The wolf can’t count), I rubinetti sono fiumi deviati (Taps are diverted rivers) and Vivere in campagna desensibilizza (Living in the countryside desensitizes) – which, together with the installation and visual parts, participate in the definition of the goliardic character of the show
and establish a dialogue between its various elements.
Photography by Gabriele Abbruzzese
NERO Magazine
- exhibition, curator
Associazione Barriera, Turin
11.02.2022 – 13.03.2022
The practice of Alana Stefanato is the result of an autodidactic path outside the main Academies and art schools, and it acts through the medium of painting yet looking beyond it, incorporating other languages over time, such as drawing and sculpture. Stefanato uses the traditional technique of oil painting, which with time led him to conceive different possibilities and solutions. A first period, hallmarked by landscapes inhabited by surreal and grotesque characters, is followed by a secon period distinguished by a more abstract style, made of backgrounds, shapes, colors and sensations, and based on a meticulous process of phenomenal observation of nature and altered mimesis.
The project encompasses a corpus of unpublished works that further develops this line of research, highlighting the expressiveness of the technique, the
pictorial sign and its spontaneous ramification. Painting is reduced to an instinctive act rather than a decorative one: the work session, which can last even up to 12 hours, is never over until the work is completed. The time spent to create a painting is usually quite limited, so that improvisation and discovery are essential features of the production, experienced as a deeply intimate and intense experience.
Pantomima XXX develops from the idea of the frame as a device that suggests an interpretation of the exhibition. The frame, whose function is not only to delimit a canvas, but also to contain the space represented in the painting, in this case performs a more open function. Made in op-art style, combining abstract subjects and colors, the frames’ patterns trigger an unsettling and nauseating
effect that projects the work towards a fourth dimension and fuels a tension between the ideas of belonging and destination, reality and fiction.
As a fil rouge that runs through the entire project, the alternation of black and white is part of a lively and expressive narrative, a pantomime
conceived as a wordless action of theatrical representation. Meanwhile, this alternation establishes a parallelism with the pictorial practice as a silent language made of gestures and movement applied to the canvas. The para-theatrical imagination reveals itself starting from an unrea dialogue between the Moon and Pierrot, a character who lost his slyness and duplicity to
become a melancholic mime who is love with the moon, the same Gilles of the famous painting by Antoine Watteau.
The conversation between Pierrot and the Moon is a crosstalk that follows a succession of paradoxical visions and associations, a surreal and sometimes dreamlike chat. An atmosphere that is reflected especially in the text written by the artist, but also in some of the paintings’ titles – Il lupo non sa contare (The wolf can’t count), I rubinetti sono fiumi deviati (Taps are diverted rivers) and Vivere in campagna desensibilizza (Living in the countryside desensitizes) – which, together with the installation and visual parts, participate in the definition of the goliardic character of the show
and establish a dialogue between its various elements.
Photography by Gabriele Abbruzzese
NERO Magazine
