Gioele Amaro. Missing Figures

About

Missing Figures is an exhibition to which you will always arrive too late. As we stand, catching our breath before the first of the works, we are met by the radiating aura of a figure just gone. Throughout the show, Amaro teases us with perpetual almost-meetings. Domed structures that call to mind Byzantine iconography glow suggestively, as if the missing subjects might return any second. For now, their auras come to the forefront of the images, gradients of luminous hues emanating from the canvases — perhaps we were always missing the most vital aspects of these religious scenes. We pass the time absorbed by the images. We approach the canvases to examine their surfaces, we read the accompanying text, and, slowly, the aesthetics of absence emerges as a metaphor for another absence altogether, the absence of a painter.

— Sophie Naufal, Arts Journalist