Sensorial Derailments

About

Andreas Blank, Cristiano de Gaetano, Jack Otway. Three artists whose research plays and confronts the concept of matter: be it solid and granitic, liquefied or dissolved.

Here nothing is digital or unreal, everything is material, everything is manual (human).

The entire creative process of the three artists on show is traditional, and yet so surprising, sometimes disorienting, and never conventional.

A sense of visual-perceptual ambiguity prevails.

Whether they use materials considered suitable for artistic expression or adopt unconventional materials, what predominates is the ability to invent a practice, and stubbornly follow it, seeking perfection.

And so from semiprecious stones and marble we move on to the malleability of modelling wax and the ethereal dispersion of painting – all of which are

rigorously handled without the aid of disarming technologies, as a hand-to-hand challenge between the artist and the material.

Their research is sublimated on the surface of the individual works. It is the treatment of the surface itself that generates visual insecurity and a perceptive embarrassment in the viewer.

Establishing doubt, after a first semblance of understanding, is what the artists in the exhibition yearn for: to provide an alternative vision, if not a vision of the exact opposite to what the work would appear to present.

Blank, Otway and De Gaetano capture their subjects by distorting their contours with a linguistic illusionism that lures the observer's gaze into a sort of semantic trap. The result is often a short circuit that leaves one wide-eyed, incredulous of the form one is physically faced with.

Play dough, the ultimate play material, was first manipulated by Cristiano De Gaetano (Taranto, Italy, 1975-2013) to achieve the vintage shades he desired – always starting from only the basic primary colours. The material then underwent various mistreatments. Sometimes it was brutally ironed onto a wooden board with a household iron; otherwise the waxy clay was reduced to crumbs that could be stuck onto the surface of carved wooden shapes (to create a result halfway between pointillism and pixelation), or it was simply worked with a spatula: in this case, the spectator struggles to understand the nature of the surface, mistaking it for a photographic image.

The artist plays with the work and the materials with which he creates. Exemplary is Morgan le Fay, a "traditional" oil and acrylic painting which tricks one into believing the contrary, offering the illusion that it is in fact a low relief work in play dough.

In contrast, Andreas Blank (Ansbach, Germany 1976) follows the nature of the material with which he engages. He respects it, allowing the stone itself to suggest which object should ultimately emerge from it.

His practice is thousands of years old; the sculpture emerges through the action of a hammer and chisel and, undoubtedly, the physical effort and a profound knowledge of semiprecious stone: alabaster, onyx, basalt, porphyry, serpentinite and of course, different types of marble honed from blocks and slabs originating in quarries all over the world.

Blank works and assembles the different materials in such a way as to offer the semblance of an everyday object, such as a plastic bag. Here he seeks to embody a paradox by transforming a volatile, impermanent object into a "monumental" being.

In fact, in Plastic Bag he works the surface of alabaster and white marble to provide us with an extremely realistic image, while on other occasions he tries his hand at more conceptual or abstract works.

Indeed, when compared to other sculptors who work with the same materials, Andreas Blank stands out for the elegance, rigor and honesty with which he treats his stones.

In contrast, as one approaches the pictorial works of Jack Otway (Winchester, UK 1991) one is struck by a sense of vertigo. The observer's eye struggles to focus. Colored figures, presented as if they were a geometric fractal, repeat themselves, never quite in the same sequence. And as one gets closer, an evanescent, liquefied underlayer can be perceived: a layer that creates illusory volumes and sidereal depths, an existential equation that only resolves itself on the surface of the canvas.

The stratification of various pictorial processes through addition and subtraction restores visual complexity: transparent layers outline ghosts of residual images, while hologram-like forms similar to sharp vortices threaten to suck one in. A series of complex geometries that immerse themselves in foggy, liquefied matter, in material terms these works are in fact extremely flat (almost photographic). Presenting us with the illusion of claustrophobic, superficial depth, they offer a sensation of profound darkness that emerges notwithstanding its resolution in a few, faded microns.

It is the finish of the surface, be it sculptural or pictorial, that acts as the interface between the material – as manipulated by the artist – and the viewer. Indeed, in the works on show, it is this superficial membrane that leads the viewer to misinterpret the sense of the objects placed before them.

                                                                                                                      Text by Daniela Barbieri