Ettore Spalletti

About

The exhibition will feature paintings, sculpture and works on paper that trace a path through the themes and preoccupations that drove the artist’s intimate and poetic practice. Moving between mediums, Spalletti explores the threshold between interior and exterior, painting and sculpture, works that open outwards to incorporate nature and architectural space.  

The exhibition is a testament to the continued and varied investigations into the use of color and light that Spalletti’s work embodies. For over sixty years, the artist lived and worked in Cappelle sul Tavo, a small town facing the sea in the Abruzzo region of Italy, whose landscape was both the real and spiritual basis for his works. The artist often described his practice as an attempt to capture light as it moved throughout the day. This sense of presence and quality of attention is an active element of his work, with near monochromes capturing the subtle tonal shifts of the sea and sky which surrounded him. The landscape motivates his formal register: the artist deploys a restricted palette, working almost exclusively with grey, blue and pink, the colors of the Adriatic Sea. Color, for the artist, is an affective phenomenon which can be entered, transporting the viewer to a different plane, one outside of figuration or abstraction.

Spalletti’s distinct painting technique was developed in the early 1970s. The artist would create a plaster impasto on which he would layer colored pigments of various intensities onto his planes.  From there, he would sand down the accumulated layers through a process of abrasion that provides the luminous, richly textured panels that are his trademark. This temporal process, based on daily, meditative repetition, with the artist adding careful layers over the course of weeks, cannot be understood as simply producing monochrome works.  These are works in which color is given dimension; the surface layers are imbued with color inside color, whose pigments break to reveal the white gesso underneath, a reflection of shades of light. It is the intrinsic tension between the surface image and the depth it illuminates which activates Spalletti’s work. 

In the North Gallery, three works from Spalletti’s Parole di colore (Words of color) investigate the materiality of color as it moves through the spectrum of light blue to slightly blue-shaded grey before reaching full grey. The artist was known to give himself up to “where[ever] the color is taking me.”   Existing in dialogue with these works is Sfumato, blue (Shaded blue), 2018, which softens the features of a landscape to create an overall perspective in gradations of blue. Forming a nexus with these works is Blu e oro, paesaggio, 2018, whose parallel panels of blue and gold suggest horizon lines or “a walk by the sea.” “You see the sand, then the sea, then the blue gets deeper, then there is the skyline and above it the sky.”   

Amidst this essence of chromatic intensity and crystallization of light, a sculptural column in black, Colonna persa, nero, 2000, expresses landscape, architecture and exemplarity.  The column has been a recurring element within his work since 1978.

On view in the adjacent North Gallery Viewing Room are sixteen pastel powder drawings on paper, made between 2015 and 2016. These graceful, luminous drawings combine the idea of Paesaggi (landscapes) with Sfumato (shaded), and employ an innovative technique invented by Spalletti, in which pastel powder is spread throughout the paper. Initiated at the same time as the Paesaggi series, these works may be understood as preparatory sketches and means of working through ideas of light and space.

The South Gallery features grounded sculptural works alongside paintings with atmospheric effect. The pure volume Così com'è, fonte, 2006isa form of a truncated cone ­— an archetypal shape in Spalletti’s work since Anfora, bacile, vasi (Amphora, basin, vases) in 1982. These iconic and ancient forms and volumes share a relationship with objects that have ‘traversed the whole history of art.’      

Presenza stanza 1978/2016 stands upright on the floor, enclosing the corner between two walls and circumscribing volume like an animate being. Conversely Carte rosa, 1998 and Carte di azzurro verso il mare, 1998, are panels painted on both sides. The panels become the architecture of the space, with light and shadow crossing through them at different times of day.